Annotation:One evening fair

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ONE EVENING FAIR. Irish, Air (4/4 time, "moderately slow"). D Dorian. Standard tuning (fiddle). One part. "I learned both the air and the words of this song at home in early youth" (Joyce). A variation of "Foggy Dew (The)" and thus a member of the "Boyne Water (1)" family of tunes (Cowdery, 1990). Petrie (1855) had his tune, the exact same, from the collector P.W. Joyce. Joyce gives the following words:

One evening fair as I roved out down by a river side,
I heard a lovely maiden complain--the tears roled from her eyes.
It was a cold and stormy night"-- these sad words she did say--
When my love went on the raging sea, bound for Americay!

My love he was a fisherman, his age was scarce eighteen,
He was a handsome young man as her yet was seen;
My father he has riches great, and O'Reilly was but poor,
And because he was a fisherman he could not him endure.

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Joyce (Old Irish Folk Music and Songs), 1909; No. 53, p. 29. Milligan Fox & Hughes, Journal of the Irish Folk Song Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 1904; p. 5 (contributed by P.W. Joyce). Stanford/Petrie (Complete Collection), 1905; No. 662, p. 166.

Recorded sources:

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