"Rose Connolly" Revisited: Re-Imagining the Irish in Southern Appalachia

This essay revisits the Appalachian murder ballad "Rose Connolly," the subject of a 1979 essay by D. K. Wilgus. Following Wilgus, I offer further evidence of the song's presence in Ireland and interrogate persistent hesitancy to claim Irish influence on Appalachian folklore. My analysis then traces this bias to the influence of Cecil Sharp's English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (Sharp and Campbell 1917) and his theories of race in the British Isles and Appalachia. Ultimately, I use "Rose Connolly" to re-imagine Irish diasporic and Appalachian identities.