Earlier this morning I was sitting here getting some work done while my dad was watching some show that he TiVo’d off of PBS called Celtic Woman. I’m pretty sure my dad dug it, but really
I was entirely prepared to scrub the show from my memory until the final number caught my attention — a song apparently called “You Raise Me Up” (at least, that’s what they kept repeating in the lyrics) which seemed to me to be a blatant rip-off of “Danny Boy.” Almost exactly the same rhythm and cadences, and the melody differed only superficially (kind of like when a movie or TV show features a brief parody of another show, and so uses music that sounds almost exactly like the original show — except even though it’s a parody, copyright presumably keeps them from using the same note-for-note melody, so they fake it by going up a third instead of down a third, and so on).
I did a quick Google search for both “you raise me up” and “danny boy,” to see what the connection was. Surprisingly, almost every page the search yielded was simply a listing for recordings in which both songs were featured. Nobody seemed to notice that it’s the same damn song. Except one. Jesse Walker pointed out the similarity in a Hit and Run entry about some schlocky flash animation commemorating 9/11 that featured the song:
Who sings that song, and why did he leave out the part about Danny Boy?
Down in the comments section, Jesse goes on to say:
Every time I hear that song on the car radio, I leave it on because I think it’s going to be “Danny Boy.” About a minute in, I get really disappointed.
So at least I’m in good company. But really, has nobody else made this connection before? It seemed completely obvious to me, as though it was a seriocomic parody of the original, or at least some kind of conscious tribute. Weird.
(The link to the video from Jesse’s piece no longer works; the video’s creator didn’t have permission to use the Josh Groban recording of the song. But, for the curious, this seems to be the same thing, with the singer replaced. Shudder.)
