Here again we have the story of a young man who goes out walking ‘on a bright May morning’. The encounter on this occasion is with his ‘own true lover', and the story is told in the form of a conversation. He has opted for wealth rather than love and has ‘married the lassie that had the land' but now he rues his decision: ‘Instead of gold, sure ’tis brass I find.’

As I Roved Out was one of Brigid Tunney’s favourites, one of her go-to songs, and her grandchildren would have heard her sing it scores of times. There are, of course, many songs that share the title As I Roved Out and there are a couple that are second or third cousins of this one. Of these, in terms of text, Nellie O’Donnell’s would appear to be the closest relation. 

Maura gives here not one ‘version’ or ‘variation’ amongst many but something very close to the original song as it has been handed down in the living, oral tradition, preserved across five generations since the years just after the Great Famine. Maura’s attack and pace, the carry-over from line three to line four, etc. can all be found in the singing of her father and her granny. ‘This’, as Paddy once said in answer to a specific question about the carry-over, ‘is Tradition.’

While the Tunney-Gallagher As I Roved Out has been recorded by many commercial artists, John Faulkner believes that none of them seems to have listened carefully enough to the subtleties that Brigid Tunney, in particular, brings to the melodic treatment. He argues that she takes the melody to places where modern singers don’t seem able to go. (JT)

Both air and words are to be found in the first edition of The Stone Fiddle (1979), and also in Peter Kennedy’s Folksongs of Britain and Ireland – in the latter case, for reasons entirely of Kennedy’s own, under the title of The Deluded Lover.