Annotation:Humors of Glen (1) (The)

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HUMOURS OF GLEN [1], THE. AKA and see "Good Morrow to Your Night-Cap (1)," "Humors of Glynn (2)," "Tho' Leixlip is Proud," "Thomas Leixlip the Proud." Scottish, Jig. A Minor. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABBCC. According to Dick (The Songs of Robert Burns, 1903, p. 381), "a tradition in Ireland assigns the composition to one of the family of Power, about the middle of the eighteenth century, who owned an estate near Clonmel. Glyn or Glen is a small country village midway between Carrick and Clonmel." Gow also notes that the tune is "supposedly Irish." There is a "Humours of Glen" appearing (ascribed to no one) in the McLean Collection (p. 31) published by James Johnson in Edinburgh around 1772. It also can be found in George Thomson's Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs (1799, p. 95, no. 95), and McFadyen's Repository of Scots & Irish Airs, Strathspeys, Reels (c. 1800, 13-14), Gow's Part Second of the Complete Repository (c. 1802), Thomson's Scots Musical Museum, vol. IV (1803, No. 567), O'Farrell's Pocket Companion for the Union Pipes (c. 1806), and Whyte's Collection of Scottish Airs, vol. 2 (1807, 44, with music by Joseph Haydn). The melody (with variation sets) also appears in the 1840 music manuscript collection of Cumbrian musician John Rook, and there are three similar versions of the tune in amateur violinist, antiquarian, and literary figure Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe's music manuscript book. Cazden (et al, 1982) finds variants of this tune, or significant phrases from it, in use as the melody of Catskill Mountain New York folksongs (see discussions of "The Cumberland Crew," "The Blantyre Explosion," and "The Lost Jimmy Whalen" in Folksongs of the Catskills). Gow directs it to be played "Slowish."

The melody was the vechicle for verses to an aria in John O'Keefe's comic two-act opera Poor Soldier (1783), music by William Shield, a farce about the lives of British soldiers returning home after the American War of Independence. New York music publisher Edward Riley makes note of it along with the tune in his Flute Melodies; in fact, the opera had been performed in John Street Theater in New York in the mid-18th century. The song in Poor Soldier was called "Tho' Leixlip is Proud", and commences:

Tho' Leixlip is proud of its close shady bowers,
Its clear falling waters, its murm'ring cascades,
Its grove of fine myrtle, its beds of sweet flowers,
Its lads so well dress'd, and its neat pretty maids:
As each his own village will still make the most of,
In praise of dear Carton, I hope I'm not wrong,

Poet Robert Burns liked the melody but thought the verses in Poor Soldier were "silly" and wrote new ones, which he sent in 1795 to publisher George Thomson for the Scots Musical Museum. They begin:

Their groves o' sweet myrtle let Foreign Lands reckon,

The phrase "the humours of glen" is a euphemism for physical love, according to Thomas Crawford in Society and the Lyric (1979, cited on p. 298, Notes, in Hogg, Garside & Horsfall's The Forest Minstrel, 2006). Crawford's evidence is a song called "An Old Maid's Advice" from the Cheerful Companion (1783): "In this song the old maid says her life has been ruined because she disdained love-making when young and 'never would harken to' let alone 'marry for humours of glen.'"

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Carlin (The Gow Collection), 1986; No. 335. Gow (Complete Repository), Part 2, 1802; p. 12. Riley (Flute Melodies, vol. 1), 1814; p. 61.

Recorded sources:

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