The Girl I Left Behind Me

The words came first in print. A song called The Girl I Left Behind Me appeared in The Charms of Melody, a song serial printed in Dublin from 1791, and in Exshaw's Magazine in 1794. The oldest known print of the tune is in Hime's Pocket Book for the German Flute or Violin, published in Dublin around 1810. Claims that it reached America as early as 1650 under the name Brighton Camp have no evidence behind them, and the one Brighton Camp tune anybody has found is a different melody.

It became a soldier's tune on both sides of the Atlantic. It is said to have been played as troops left for war or a ship set sail, and the U.S. regular army used it as a marching tune through the nineteenth century, with its own words about a girl named Betsey. Confederate soldiers sang a version mocking Lincoln. Thackeray used the title for a chapter of Vanity Fair, serialized in 1847 and 1848, where the soldiers step out briskly to it, and Eastman Johnson borrowed it for a painting in the early 1870s.

Along the way it picked up other names and other words. In Ireland it carried An Spailpín Fánach and later The Waxies' Dargle, in England it is Brighton Camp and a Morris dance, and Glenn Miller laid it over American Patrol during the Second World War. Old-time fiddlers kept it as a dance tune, and John Hartford recorded it as a song, a version bluegrass players still cover.

On a mandolin in G the first strain starts on the open E course and steps down the A course to the B, then climbs G, A, B, c to the d. The second strain reaches the g at the third fret of the E course twice and turns on the a at the fifth. It is a march, so the eighths want to sit squarely on the beat with a little weight on each downstroke, closer to a parade than a swing.