The Girl I Left Behind Me: A Song History
"The Girl I Left Behind Me" has been claimed by both England and Ireland, and the sources consulted do not settle the matter. For the English case, the Victorian antiquarian William Chappell (1859) dated "Brighton Camp," a song set to this melody, to 1758, linking its title to the camps posted along the English coast in 1758 and 1759 against a threatened French invasion.[1][2] The Irish case points to the tune under the name "The Spailpin Fanach" ("The Rambling Laborer"), published with words in Dublin in 1791; the collector Edward Bunting, who took it down from the elderly harper Arthur O'Neill in 1800, maintained that it was known well before then.[1] Frank Kidson wrote that a manuscript he owned dated the tune with certainty to 1797, and the earliest corroborated printing of the song is in an issue of Charms of Melody from around 1805–1806.[1]
Soldier’s Adieu, hand-colored lithograph, published by J. Baillie, New York, c1847. Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. A period farewell scene; the print is not connected to the tune.
Whatever its birthplace, the tune became a soldier's farewell. In an 1840 letter to Chappell, Bunting said regimental fifes, drums and bands had been playing it for fifty years to his knowledge, and album sleeve notes reproduced by Mainly Norfolk describe a long custom of playing it whenever a regiment marched out of a town where it had been garrisoned.[1][3] In America it turns up early in the manuscript books of Abel Shattuck (c. 1801) and of John Carrol, a military fifer and fiddler at Fort Niagara (c. 1804–1812).[1] Bruce and Emmett's Drummers' and Fifers' Guide (1862), written to train Union Army musicians, remarked that the air was usually played as soldiers moved from one city or camp to the next, and a text popular in the Civil War years was reportedly a great favorite of George Armstrong Custer.[1] The U.S. Army still uses it: it is part of the medley for the cadets' final formation at graduation from West Point.[1]
The melody also lived on as dance music. In England it was collected from morris dancers in several Cotswold villages, among them Adderbury, Bampton and Headington, and the Glenn Miller band echoed it in "American Patrol," popular during the Second World War.[2] Early American fiddle recordings include Jasper Bisbee of Michigan on Edison (1923), Howard Maxey of Franklin County, Virginia, on OKeh (1927), and John Baltzell of Mount Vernon, Ohio, on Paramount (1927).[1] It remains in jam repertoire today, and mountain dulcimer players will find it in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam collection in DAD tuning.[4]
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