“A Lover’s Lamentation” has classical references and sophisticated diction. For all his protestations, the singer is somewhat pragmatic at the end. He does not seem in too great a hurry to get back to the girl, and “if ever” he does, and “she has not deceiv’d me,” he will reconcile himself again with her. The sentiment caught public fancy beginning in the 1790s, particularly among military musicians, who adopted the tune immediately. It has had a vigorous life among traditional musicians, used for marches, country dances, and English Morris dances into the twenty-first century.
Samuel Bayard noticed all the versions of this tune that he collected had the same title, “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” with an alternate title of “Brighton Camp” in the British Isles (#338). Steve Roud’s compilation verifies this finding with over forty versions of the text beginning “I’m lonesome since I crossed the hills” ranging from early nineteenth-century slip ballads to American oral tradition (Roud #262; Wolfe, Secular Music #3123-34). The lyrics and tune are so well matched, it is likely that they were composed together, most likely sometime in the late 1780s. By the 1790s, the tune, as “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” was used for new songs, printed in tune collections, and collected into manuscript tune books. The text appeared in eleven songsters between 1798 and 1817 (R. Keller, Early American Songsters; Wolfe, Secular Music #3123-24; Roud; Laws P1; Fleischmann, Sources #5244).
Irish origins for the tune have been claimed, which are suggested further by the tune’s appearance in Hime’s Pocket Book for the German Flute (ca. 1810) and Scotsman John Fife’s title for the tune in his manuscript book of music for the fife as “A Favorite Irish Quickstep, The Girl I Left Behind Me” (247).
While parts of the text “Her Answer” imply a “female warrior” theme, the girl’s suggestions that she will “in man’s array” sail off to find her love seem more rhetorical than an actual decision. She returns to her lamentation to wait until “those lads may see their homes again.” This “answer” has less of the sophistication of the first song and was probably written to capitalize on the popularity of “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” It seems intended for the same tune. The text appeared in four songsters between 1800 and 1817 (R. Keller, Early American Songsters).
