Beauty In Tears: A Song History
“Beauty in Tears” is an Irish air in 3/4 time and D major, and Francis O’Neill printed it as No. 635 in O’Neill’s Music of Ireland (1903).[1] On page 113 of that collection it carries the tempo mark “Moderate” and an Irish title set in Gaelic type, and O’Neill’s index files it among the tunes he classed as O’Carolan’s compositions.[2] The Traditional Tune Archive calls that attribution to the blind harper Turlough O’Carolan (1670–1738) mistaken.[1] The same page also notes that Donal O’Sullivan left the melody out of his 1958 study of the harper.[1]
John Egan, Portable Harp, Dublin, 1819. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the air.
The Tune Archive also links the air to “The Ash Grove,” describing “Beauty in Tears” as a possible ancestor of that melody.[1][3] Its Ash Grove page says that, because of O’Neill’s attribution and the likeness between the two tunes, “The Ash Grove” is sometimes attributed to Carolan too.[3] That page also reports that some regard “The Ash Grove” as an early eighteenth-century Welsh melody, and it dates the tune’s earliest Welsh printing to Edward Jones’s Bardic Museum (1802).[3] The only recording the Tune Archive lists is by Isao and Masako Moriyasu, on The Complete Works of Turlough O’Carolan, Vol. 3 (Waon Records, 2008).[1]
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