The Gloaming - Cucanandy

Cucanandy is taken from the new album by The Gloaming out now on Real World Records. Iarla Ó Lionáird from The Gloaming gives some background to the song and this recording “This is a song which comes to us from the singing of my great aunt, the late Elizabeth (Bess) Cronin. A simple and apparently quite jolly country woman from the West Cork region of Na Milíní in the parish of Ballyvourney, where I myself was raised. She came to prominence in the Folk music world through recordings that were made of her by Alan Lomax for his now famous Folkways Collection in the early 1950’s and by Jean Richie and the BBC’s Seamus Ennis. This is a children’s song, a rhythmic and playful lyric thought to have been deployed whilst bouncing a child on one’s knee at playtime. There is however a strange verse at the song’s end whose provenance is unclear and it is this unusual section that we frame as the focus in our version as it asks perhaps the most searching question as per the cho