I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen

An American parlor song written in 1875 by Thomas Paine Westendorf (1848–1923), a German-American schoolteacher then working at a juvenile reformatory in Indiana, and published by John Church & Co. of Cincinnati in 1876. Though universally adopted as an Irish exile song, it contains no mention of Ireland: Westendorf wrote it as an answer song to his friend George Persley’s “Barney, Take Me Home Again,” and his wife — often claimed as the Kathleen of the title — was actually named Jennie. The song’s later folklore (that it’s traditional, that it’s Irish, that Kathleen was real) is thoroughly debunked in Richard S. Hill’s 1948 article “Getting Kathleen Home Again.” It became Josef Locke’s signature tune, was serenaded to Maureen O’Hara by the Sons of the Pioneers in John Ford’s Rio Grande (1950), and was recorded by Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, and Johnny Cash.