The Ash Grove

Llwyn Onn is the Welsh title, and it means the ash grove. The harpist Edward Jones printed the melody in 1802 in The Bardic Museum, and Welsh words came about four years later: a sailor's song for Gwen of Llwyn, who dies at the end and is buried under the ash trees. The tune is probably older than the book. John Gay's Beggar's Opera of 1728 has an air called "Cease Your Funning" that sounds a good deal like it, and Beethoven set that air as the fifth of his Twelve Scottish Songs. The collector Frank Kidson went further in 1922 and said Gay had lifted it from Constant Billy, a morris tune in Playford's Dancing Master of 1665. Neither claim comes with any paper behind it. The first hard date is 1802.

The English words most people know are Thomas Oliphant's, from 1862. They appeared in the first volume of Welsh Melodies, with Welsh and English Poetry, which the harpist John Thomas compiled with Welsh verses by John Jones, the poet who wrote as Talhaiarn. Oliphant's song opens "Down yonder green valley, where streamlets meander." The other set people know, "The ash grove, how graceful, how plainly 'tis speaking," is John Oxenford's, and he borrowed Oliphant's first verse for his second. Churchgoers know the tune under its hymnal name, ASH GROVE. The Master Hath Come, Sarah Doudney's hymn of 1871, is sung to it, so is Sent Forth by God's Blessing, and Katherine K. Davis wrote Let All Things Now Living for it in 1939. That Thanksgiving hymn is how the melody ended up on Christmas records in the 1950s. Early in John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, from 1941, the miners sing it in Welsh.

It has an American address too. Ed Pearl named his folk club on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles the Ash Grove after the song. It ran from 1958 to 1973, and Doc Watson, Mississippi John Hurt, Lightnin' Hopkins, Ry Cooder and the Greenbriar Boys all played there. Benjamin Britten published an arrangement of the tune in 1943 and Roger Quilter another in 1950, and both are still in copyright. The melody under them is not, and the melody is what this page carries.

In G the tune sits in first position the whole way. The lowest note is the C at the fifth fret of the G course and the highest is the open E. The one accidental is the C sharp two bars from the end of the middle strain, the leading note into D, at the fourth fret of the A course. Most bars are quarter notes with a short run of eighths here and there, all of them stepwise, so the left hand has an easy time. The right hand does the work. The held G at the end of each pass through the first strain and the held d at the end of the middle one are the places where a mandolin has to tremolo or go quiet, and those long notes are most of what there is to practice. Thirty two bars is less to learn than it sounds. The first strain comes around three times, so eight bars is three quarters of the tune.