[LUTE] Lillyburlero or Lilliburlero

[Howard Posner]

  bill kilpatrick wrote:

> i was under the impression that purcell lifted the
> melody to "lillibullero" from an unnamed irish tune.
>
> is this correct and if so, does the refrain ...
>
> lero lero lillibullero
> lillibullero bullen a la
>
> .. have any significance other than nonsense rhyme?

Try googling Lillyburlero or Lilliburlero and you'll get some readings 
other than one Tony gave (the reference to Ann Boleyn strikes me as 
about a century off).  For what it's worth, the Wikipedia article says:

"The song's title and the words of the refrain have been interpreted as 
a garbled version of the Irish words (an) lile ba leir e, ba linn an 
la, "(the) lily was clear and ours was the day". The lily may be a 
reference to the fleur de lis of France, or to a popular interpreter of 
prophecies named John Lilly. Alternatively, the lyrics could mean, 
"Lilly is clear [about this], the day will be ours"."


The lyrics at http://ingeb.org/songs/hobrothr.html bear this postscript:

'The lily was clear, the day was ours' goes back to 1641 when the Irish 
defeated (or 'massacred' depending on your view point) the Protestant 
Planters.=A0 The 'lily' was presumably their standard - it remained the 
only one standing on the field of battle - it stood 'clear' - the day 
was their's - 'An Lile ba leir e ba linn an la' was therefore their 
victory chant.


And at  http://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/eire/hobrothr.htm you get the 
lyrics plus:

"Emmanuel Kehoe writes:
Lilliburlero is a remarkable song about the political situation at the 
time of the Battle of the Boyne (1690) when the newly imported William 
of Orange defeated the Stuart King James. This truly European war ("The 
Glorious Revolution" as it became known to Protestant England) dragged 
on for some time, and much of it was fought in series of bitter sieges 
of Irish cities. It ended with the Treaty of Limerick after which 
almost the entire Irish army sailed to France where they served French 
kings in the Irish Brigade until the revolution. They were the original 
Wild Geese.

The word Lilliburlero may be entirely meaningless but the Irish writer 
Brendan Behan claimed it was a corruption of the Gaelic: " An lili ba 
leir e, ba linn an la" - roughly "The lily won the day for us". Today 
the Loyalists of Northern Ireland wear the orange lily to commemorate 
the Boyne. (Republicans, not to be outdone) wear a white lily, which 
they call the Easter lily to commemorate the Easter Rising of 1916."

Lilliburlero is the signature tune of the world service of the BBC and 
so is heard all over the world many times a day.
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