The legacy: together with the Old maid's last prayer

“The Legacy,” a romantic lyric by Thomas Moore, was published in his second number of Irish Melodies (1807). An immediate hit, the song circulated to all social levels. The music and first verse were printed in William Walker’s 1847 shape note tune book The Southern Harmony and the song was popular enough in the 1850s and 1860s to be reported as one of Abraham Lincoln’s favorites (#73; Lair).

In Irish Melodies Moore provided new verses to older tunes using the musical transcriptions of Edward Bunting (1773-1843), an organist who had been commissioned to write down the tunes played by Irish harpers at their “final meeting” in Belfast in 1792. Bunting published somewhat altered versions of these tunes in 1796, 1809, and 1841. The first edition served as a treasure trove for Moore. In preparing his collection, though, Moore collaborated with Sir John Stevenson (1761-1833), music director of the Dublin Cathedral. Stevenson adapted the occasionally “wild” tunes into popular music suitable for the stage and parlor, continuing the smoothing and “correcting” that Bunting had begun. Ultimately, Moore lamented this “regularization” but felt that Stevenson had done the best job he could under the circumstances (Schrader, “Annotated Moore” 3-4).

The tune had already appeared as “The Bard’s Legacy” in Smollet Holden’s Collection of Quick and Slow Marches, Troops, &c. (ca. 1805), suggesting that another text of the same type was already extant (Fleischmann, Sources #4666). Holden’s indication that the tune was a march is echoed by its appearance as “Quick Step” in Elisha Belknap’s fife manuscript begun in 1784 in Framingham, Massachusetts. Later American imprints of the 1810-20 period reflect Moore’s title “The Legacy.” Richard J. Wolfe lists the song’s many imprints under Stevenson as composer but his role apparently was more that of arranger of the preexisting tune to Moore’s words (Secular Music #8806-16).

Of all of Moore’s songs, this one and “The Bower” (see The Reformed Rake) for some reason must have appealed to the poorer classes. They are regularly found in cheap songsters and broadsides—appearing in forty-four songsters between 1811 and 1820—while the rest of Moore’s songs that survived through the late nineteenth century are usually found in more expensive songbooks and sheet music (R. Keller, Early American Secular Music and Its European Sources; Schrader, “Annotated Moore” 3; Roud).

Worthington Ford was disturbed by the brutal “Parody on the Above” of Moore’s popular lyric and termed it a “descent to the gutter” (“Isaiah Thomas” 49). The lyric follows the model almost line by line.

The third text on this broadside is described in another broadside of the same title, The Old Maid’s Last Prayer.