“The Girl I Left Behind Me” is a marching air and dance tune that both the Irish and the English have claimed. The Fiddler’s Companion concludes that it dates to the 18th century and that little more is certain. The Irish case rests on “An Spailpín Fánach” (“The Rambling Labourer”), whose words and music were printed in Dublin in 1791. The collector Edward Bunting took the melody down from the old harper Arthur O’Neill in 1800. The English case goes back to William Chappell. In 1859 he tied the tune to the song “Brighton Camp” and to the coastal camps of 1758–59, set up against a threatened French invasion. The manuscripts he said proved this have never been found. The earliest corroborated printing of the song under its English title is in Charms of Melody, around 1805–06, and a songster of 1799 already names it as a tune.
By the early 19th century it had become a regimental marching air. In 1840 Bunting wrote to Chappell that fifes, drums and bands had played it for fifty years “on their leaving the towns for new quarters.” The often-repeated story that it was played as warships sailed or regiments left for foreign service is plausible, but no solid evidence supports it.
In America it turns up in the manuscript books of Abel Shattuck (about 1801) and of John Carrol, a fifer and fiddler at Fort Niagara. It also appears in Riley’s Flute Melodies, published in New York from 1814. During the Civil War, Bruce and Emmett’s Drummers’ and Fifers’ Guide (1862) noted that the air was “generally played at the departure of the soldiers.” The book’s co-author was Daniel Decatur Emmett, composer of “Dixie.” The tune was a favourite of George Custer and became the regimental song of the 7th Cavalry. It is still played at West Point, in the medley for the cadets’ final formation at graduation.
It also lived on as a dance tune, and gained new life as one in the South. It was a set piece at an 1899 fiddle contest in Gallatin, Tennessee, and belonged to the repertoire of Uncle Jimmy Thompson and of Mellie Dunham, Henry Ford’s champion fiddler. The Michigan fiddler Jasper Bisbee recorded it for Edison in 1923. Howard Maxey of Franklin County, Virginia, recorded it for OKeh in 1927, and John Baltzell of Mount Vernon, Ohio, for Paramount in the same year. In the early 1940s Vance Randolph recorded Ozark fiddlers playing it for the Library of Congress. Fiddlers almost always play it in G.
