This is a rollicking fun song. I think my favorite rendition is a live rendition with the Clancy Brothers where one of them comes out on the stage and says "We're going to do Finnegan's wake but before we start Tommy is going to read the entire novel by James Joyce." Then Tommy starts reading what sounds like gibberish and I had to check that this is indeed how the novel starts!
My mother had a record with this and the Russian Sailor's Dance and a few other orchestral dances on it but this was definitely my favorite. With that name how could it not be? There's a little interlude in Disney's Fantasia where they talk about how some music is representational -- it's supposed to directly suggest a scene. I always think of this as the epitome of such music. The sound's of the bone clanking and the cock crowing at the end. It was only recently since I've taken up ballroom dancing that I see it as a very fast waltz. The energy it would take to dance so fast and so long. Even the dead would be exhausted at the end.
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