As I Roved Out: A Song History

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Several unrelated traditional songs share the title "As I Roved Out."[1] The Irish band Planxty recorded two of them on the album The Well Below the Valley (1973), one sung by Andy Irvine and the other by Christy Moore.[2] Their sleeve note made clear that the two songs had nothing in common beyond the name.[1]

Early photograph of a wooded river with rocks and a moored boat at Killarney

Lord Otho Fitzgerald, The Meeting of the Waters, Killarney, albumen silver print, 1854. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). An Irish scene shown for its setting; it has no connection to these songs.

Irvine's song is catalogued as "The Deluded Lover" (Roud 3479): a man meets the sweetheart he left behind when he married a wealthier woman.[3] The Traditional Ballad Index, which also cross-references it as Roud 6289, gives its earliest date as 1906 in the Greig–Duncan collection from Scotland and notes that the Irish singers Michael Gallagher and Paddy Tunney both called it "As I Roved Out."[4] In 1953 Peter Kennedy and Seán O'Boyle recorded Michael Gallagher of Belleek, County Fermanagh, singing a version he had learned from an aunt in Donegal.[3] Paddy Tunney, who learned the song from his mother, recorded it on The Man of Songs (Folk-Legacy, 1962), and Irvine credited Tunney's singing as Planxty's source; June Tabor and Kate Rusby are among the singers who have recorded it since.[3]

Moore's song (Roud 277, Laws O17) is better known in England as "Seventeen Come Sunday," in which a man questions a young woman he meets and arranges a night visit; the Ballad Index gives its earliest date as Robert Burns's "A Waukrife Minnie" in The Scots Musical Museum (1790) and lists versions from Britain, Ireland, Canada and the United States.[5] The London printers Pitts and Jennings were issuing it on broadsides in or before the 1820s, and in Ireland it is widely sung as "As I Roved Out"; Sarah Makem of Keady, County Armagh, sang the opening song of a radio programme with that title, which brought her wide attention.[1] The folklorist Peter Kennedy helped develop a BBC radio series called As I Roved Out, which ran from 1953 to 1958.[6] Makem also opens the Folkways album As I Roved Out (Field Trip–Ireland) (1960), made from field recordings by the Kentucky singer and dulcimer player Jean Ritchie and George Pickow.[7] To complicate matters further, the Ballad Index observes that a blend of this song with "Trooper and Maid" (Child 299, Roud 162) may also carry the title, and it lists Séamus Ennis's "As I Roved Out" under both songs.[8][5]

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Sources

  1. Mainly Norfolk: "Seventeen Come Sunday / As I Roved Out (Roud 277)".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "Planxty" (discography).
  3. Mainly Norfolk: "As I Roved Out / The Deluded Lover (Roud 3479)".
  4. The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Deluded Lover".
  5. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Seventeen Come Sunday [Laws O17]".
  6. Peter Kennedy Archive: "Peter Kennedy (1922–2006)".
  7. Smithsonian Folkways: "As I Roved Out (Field Trip–Ireland)".
  8. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Trooper and Maid [Child 299]".