My Wild Irish Rose

“My Wild Irish Rose” is an Irish-American parlor ballad written by Chauncey Olcott (1858–1932) in 1899, introduced in his Broadway musical A Romance of Athlone, which opened January 9, 1899, with sheet music published by M. Witmark & Sons of New York. The title came from Olcott’s wife Margaret: on a visit to Ireland in 1898, a young boy gave her a flower and called it “a wild Irish rose”; she later retrieved it from an album when Olcott asked her for a new song title. The earliest recording was made by A. C. Campbell in 1899. Subsequent covers followed from artists including Walter Van Brunt, the Haydn Quartet, and the Columbia Stellar Quartette. John Barnes Wells recorded it for Victor in 1910 with orchestra.

Chauncey Olcott (Chancellor John Olcott, July 21, 1858 – March 18, 1932) was born in Buffalo, New York, to a family with Irish roots on his mother’s side. After early years in minstrelsy, he was recruited in 1893 to succeed William J. Scanlan as the leading tenor in sentimental Irish-themed operettas. He was inducted posthumously into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, and Warner Bros. made a biographical film about his life in 1947, also titled My Wild Irish Rose, with Dennis Morgan in the lead role.