Annotation:Once I had a Sweetheart
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ONCE I HAD A SWEETHEART. English, Air or Waltz. A Minor (Knowles): D Minor (Flood). Standard tuning (fiddle). One Part (Flood): AAB (Knowles). Grattan Flood (1905, 1906), with characteristic abandon, claims the air for "Once I had a sweetheart" was originally an Irish tune composed around the year 1695 by the blind harper Turlough O'Carolan. There seems to be no evidence for this however. Kidson thought the air an "old and pretty folk-melody" that he traced back as far as Daniel Wright's Complete Tutor for ye Flute, c. 1735. As a song it has had amazing longevity. Grattan Flood found it as a vehicle for a song in Charles Coffey's (1700-1745) Anglo-Irish ballad opera The Beggar's Wedding produced in Dublin in 1729, after Gay's Beggar's Opera (1728). It also appears in the ballad opera Silvia (1731) as the air "So kind and so unwilling." Malcolm Douglas finds that Baring-Gould noted "Once I had a sweetheart" in Songs of the West, while Cecil Sharp and Hammond published it in the Journal of the Folk Song Society (vol. 5, no. 18, 1914 and vol. 3, No. 11, 1907, respectively). In 1932 the journal, renamed the Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, printed a version from Australia that had been learned in Gloucestershire (vol. 1, no.1, 1932). Malcolm says that Phoebe Smith and Paddy Tunney had versions, and another, learned by Maurice Ogg from Edith Leaning of Coleby, Lincolnshire, appeared in English Dance and Song, vol.43, no.2, 1981.
Source for notated version:
Printed sources: Flood, 1905; p. 104. Knowles (Northern Frisk), 1988; No. 70.
Recorded sources: