Down By The Salley Gardens: A Song History

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"Down by the Salley Gardens" is a poem by W. B. Yeats, first printed in 1889 in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems under the title "An Old Song Re-sung."[1][2][3] Yeats added a note tracing the poem to an old woman in Ballisodare, County Sligo, who sang a few lines of a song to herself but recalled only three of them; his verses were an effort to piece that song together again.[1][2] Which song she was singing is not certain. Several writers point to the ballad "The Rambling Boys of Pleasure," and Ó Boyle, writing in 1976, connected it to a handwritten American copy dated 1785. The collector P. J. McCall also claimed to have heard a love song of this title in 1875, with an opening verse much like Yeats's.[1][2][3]

Rembrandt etching of a large old willow tree on a riverbank, with a man looking across the water at boats and windmills

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Omval, etching and drypoint, 1645. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A Dutch riverbank with an old willow; it has no connection to the song.

The melody usually sung to the poem is the Irish air "The Maids of Mourne Shore," which George Petrie had noted in County Derry in 1834. Herbert Hughes joined Yeats's words to it in 1909, and it appears in the first volume of his Irish Country Songs under both names.[4][2][5] The pairing stuck. Benjamin Britten made it the opening song of the first volume of his folk-song arrangements, and recordings range from James Galway with the Chieftains to Clannad and Loreena McKennitt.[6][3][2]

Musicians should not confuse the song with the dance tune "Sally Gardens," a reel in G that was for a time a session favourite and that the Traditional Tune Archive files as a separate piece; Paddy O'Brien's 1954 Columbia recording of it was much copied by accordion players in London. The same archive explains the name: a "sally garden" was a plot of willows grown for wickerwork. It also lists another air titled "Down by the Sally Gardens," printed in 1914, which it notes is not the tune usually sung to Yeats's words today.[7][3]

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Sources

  1. Mainly Norfolk: "Down by the Salley Gardens".
  2. Ask About Ireland: "Down by the Sally Gardens".
  3. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Down by the Sally Gardens (1)".
  4. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Maids of Mourne Shore (The)".
  5. College of the Holy Cross Libraries: "Irish country songs" (Herbert Hughes), table of contents.
  6. IRCAM Brahms: Benjamin Britten, "Folk Songs, volume 1".
  7. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Sally Gardens (1) (The)".