Music

        I'm a longtime Judy Collins fan, and will frequently play her album "Whales and Nightingales", which includes the haunting "Farewell to Tarwathie".

      You can hear her sing it HERE.

      I FINALLY researched the place the song is named for...a hamlet in Scotland, but really not that far from the Irish coastal town from which my ancestors set sail to America in the 1880's, County Mayo.

Judy Collins sang Farewell to Tarwathie, accompanied by humpback whales recordings, on her 1970 album Whales and Nightingales. This track was also included in 1972 on her anthology Colors of the Day.

Farewell to Tarwathie is a poem by George Scroggie about the ca. 1850 West Greenland right whale fishing, from his book The Peasant’s Lyre, A Collection of Miscellaneous Poems (Strichen, Aberdeenshire, printed by William Bennett, 1857, p. 73).