Annotation:Down Beside Me
Tune properties and standard notation
DOWN BESIDE ME (Sin Sios agus sios liom). AKA and see "Lie up with me and lie down with me." Irish, Air (cut time). G Major. Standard tuning. AABB. Brendan Breathnach points out that this composition is probably the first Irish air with associated lyrics to have appeared in print, along with a relative called "The Bands of Banna" (in Moffat, Minstrelsy of Ireland," 4th ed., 1897) and reproduces a British broadside sheet of the song which appeared c. 1714 with the note "An Irish song sung by Mr. Abell at his consort at Stationers Hall." Samuel Bayard writes (in "A Miscellany of Tune Notes," in Studies in Folklore, p. 160) the earliest set he saw was in The Merry Musician, or a Cure for the Spleen, Pt. 1, printed in London in 1716 (pp. 327-28), also labelled an Irish song likewise referencing "sung by Mr. Abel at his Consort at Stationers-Hall." Words printed with the tune in the London publication, apparently some kind of phonetic version of Irish Gaelic, go:
Shein sheis shuus lum Drudenal as fask me; Core la boe funareen, A Homon crin a party; Tamagra sa souga Ta she Loof her Layder; Hey ho, rirko, Serenish on bash me.
Several early collections carried the melody, finds O'Sullivan (1983), including Wright's Aria di Camera (c. 1730), Neale's Celebrated Irish Tunes (c. 1726), Thompson's Hibernian Muse (c. 1786), Holden's Collection of Old-Established Irish Slow and Quick Tunes (1806) and Holden's Collection of Most Esteemed Old Irish Melodies, book I (post 1806). A tune by this title has been attributed in some sources as an early composition of the 18th century harper Turlough O'Carolan, though it is not mentioned as such by either Bunting or his editor O'Sullivan. See also note to "Sin Sios agus sios liom").
Source for notated version: the Irish collector Edward Bunting variously attributed his sources to "Denis a Hempson, Hugh Higgins and Mrs. Bristow, who was taught it by Dominic Mungan" (MS. version), "D. Black, Harper in 1796" (index, 1840 collection) and "from the performance of Dominic Mungan, the celebrated harper the father of Bishop Warburton" (introduction, 1840 collection).
Printed sources: O'Sullivan/Bunting, 1983; No. 38, pp. 59-60.
Recorded sources: