Sunday 23 August 2020
Tune of the Day: My True Love Has Gone From Me
Traditional Irish air
This Irish air is taken from Francis O'Neill's collection Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melody, published in Chicago in 1922. He notes:
This air like scores of others was unconsciously memorized in my boyhood days at Tralibane some three miles southeast of Bantry, West Cork. All that I can remember now of the ballad sung to it is the distich: “My true love he has gone from me, and I can’t tell how far / Eighteen hundred thousand miles, on board of a man of war”. It is not likely that the poetaster in equalizing his meter realized the absurdity of a voyage equal to seventy-two times the circumference of the Earth.