Red Haired Boy is the rare tune that crossed the Atlantic and kept its shape. The Traditional Tune Archive calls it one of the most popular and most recorded of all traditional fiddle tunes, and one of the few melodies that fiddlers in Ireland, Scotland, and America hold in common. In Ireland it has words and a different name, The Little Beggarman. In bluegrass it has no words at all, just a stream of eighth notes and one chord that tells you the tune is old.
Where it came from
The title is an English translation of the Gaelic Giolla Rua, the red-haired lad. In Scotland and England the same name became Gilderoy, and the tune is thought to commemorate a real rogue and bandit. The collector Sabine Baring-Gould noted a second claim: Scottish singers tied the beggar of the title to King James V.
Across the British Isles, people sang a song to this melody. Its narrator is a roving beggar named Johnny Dhu, and the song goes by The Little Beggarman or The Beggarman. A different song, The Jolly Beggar, credited to a Scottish king, sometimes gets tangled with this one. Baring-Gould printed the song in his Garland of Country Song in 1895, and a Scots version appears in James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum in the late 1700s. Edward Bunting printed a variant of the melody as An Maidrin Ruadh, The Little Red Fox, in his 1840 collection of ancient Irish music. Francis O’Neill printed it in Chicago in his 1903 Music of Ireland, tune number 1748.
Few melodies were shared by fiddlers across both Scotland and Ireland. This one was, and it crossed to America with few changes, north and south. New regions gave it new names: The Old Soldier with a Wooden Leg in West Virginia, and The Red Headed Irishman in Kentucky. The Flanagan Brothers cut it for Columbia in 1923. Kentucky fiddler J.P. Fraley carried it in the old-time tradition. Bluegrass claimed it in the 1960s, when Doc Watson’s flatpicking and Bill Keith’s melodic banjo showed that guitar and banjo could state a fiddle melody note for note. Note-heavy Irish tunes like this one moved to the center of the repertoire.
How it works
The form is AABB: play the first part twice, then the second part twice. Bluegrass players keep it in A, but not plain A major. The melody uses the A mixolydian scale, which has a G natural where A major has a G sharp. That one note shapes the whole tune. When the melody lands on G natural, the band moves to a G chord, the flat seven. In Nashville numbers the A part runs 1, 4, 1, b7, then 1, 4, 1, 5, 1. The B part opens on the b7 chord itself (b7, 4, 1, b7) and closes like the A part.
That G chord puts Red Haired Boy in a modal family with Old Joe Clark and Salt Creek. Learn the three together and the b7 move becomes automatic. Irish players treat the tune as a hornpipe with a swing, and The Session lists it that way. Bluegrass players run it as a straight breakdown. It is a fixture at jams, a common pick at fiddle contests, and an early stop for flatpickers working through our songbook.
Recordings worth hearing
The recorded history starts in 1923, when the Flanagan Brothers cut the tune for Columbia on a 78 (Columbia A3849). For the song side, hear The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem sing The Little Beggarman on Recorded Live in Ireland (Columbia, 1965). Tony Rice put the modern flatpicking stamp on the tune on California Autumn (Rebel, 1975), and guitar players still measure themselves against it. That same decade the David Bromberg Band recorded it on Midnight on the Water (Columbia, 1975). Canadian fiddler Ward Allen played it on Maple Leaf Hoedown, Vol. 2 (Sparton). The New Hampshire dance band Northern Spy recorded it on Choose Your Partners!, a 1999 Smithsonian Folkways collection of contra dance music. Billy Strings recorded it with mandolinist Don Julin on Rock of Ages (2013), proof that the tune keeps finding new hands.
Sources
Facts on this page come from the Traditional Tune Archive’s Red Haired Boy annotation, Red Haired Boy tune page, and Little Beggarman annotation, from the Little Beggarman page at The Session, from the Red Haired Boy chord notes at the Idaho Bluegrass Association, and from release listings for California Autumn at Discogs, Recorded Live in Ireland at Discogs, and Rock of Ages at Spotify.