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FAMOUS SONGS
a contemporary of John OTuomy, who was born at Croome, 1706, and died August, 1775, in Limerick. O'Tuomy was a man of much learning, and the author of some dozens of songs. Copies of the original melody, to which later words were set, date back to 1620.
" The Girl I left Behind Me" is of indis-putable Hibernian origin, though the exact date of its composition is not known; but Arthur O'Neill, the celebrated harper, informed Bunt-ing that it had been taught him when he was little more than a child (he was born 1730) by Owen Keenan, his first master, who had had it from a previous harper. Chappell gives the date of the music, " Eighteenth century, words about 1759," but the air was certainly known to the harpers a century earlier than that O'Neill died in 1815 at the age of eighty-five. The English version of the words and the Irish differ considerably. I give the first stanza of the latter:
u The dames of France are fond and free, And Flemish lips are willing, And soft the maids of Italy,
"While Spanish eyes are thrilling. Still though I bask beneath their smile,
Their charms quite fail to bind me, And my heart falls back to Erin's Isle, To the girl I left behind me." 167 |
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