Annotation:Merry Bacchanal (The)

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MERRY BACCHANAL, THE. AKA - "Merry Bacchanalian (The)." English, Air and Country Dance (6/4 time). C Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB. The melody was published by London publisher John Johnson in his Wright's Compleat Collection of Celebrated Country Dances (1740), but was also the air to a song, printed on 18th century single sheets in Britain and America. The first line of the song, "Come here's to the nymph that I love" is the first line of "A Bacchanal Song," printed in Allan Ramsay's Tea Table Miscellany (1750), wherein it is directed to be sung to the tune of "Auld/Old Sir Simon the King." It begins:

Come here's to the nymph that I love!
Away ye vain sorrows, away:
Far, far from my sorrows be gone,
All there shall be pleasant and gay.

Far hence be the sad and the pensive,
Come fill up the glasses around,
We'll drink till our faces be ruddy,
And all our vain sorrows are drown'd.

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Johnson (Wright's Compleat Collection of Celebrated Country Dances), 1740; p. 78.

Recorded sources:

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