Annotation:Fly Not Yet
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FLY NOT YET. AKA and see "Hugh Kelly," "Planxty O'Kelly." Irish, Jig. G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). One part (O'Farrell): AA'BB' (Kerr). O'Farrell gives the provenance as Irish. The melody is O'Carolan's "Hugh Kelly" or "Planxty Kelly," set to words by Thomas Moore (1779-1852), published in his Irish Melodies, vol. 1 (1808). The song begins:
Fly not yet, 'tis just the hour,
When pleasure, like the midnight flower
That scorns the eye of vulgar light,
Begins to bloom for sons of night,
And maids who love the moon.
Alfred Moffat (Minstrelsy of Ireland, 1897, p. 344) remarks: "An early version of the tune was sung in Shield's Opera, Robin Hood (1784), to verses beginning "When the chill sirocco blows." Almost the same setting of the air as that adopted by Moore was used in The Siege of St. Quintis (1808), an opera, the text of which was written by Theodore Hook."
Source for notated version:
Printed sources: Kerr (Merry Melodies, vol. 3), c. 1880's; No. 278, p. 30. Moffat (Minstrelsy of Ireland), 1897. O'Farrell (Pocket Companion, vol. III), c. 1808; p. 21.
Recorded sources: