The Parting glass has its origins in the early seventeenth-century Scottish song ‘Good Night and God be With You’ which used a tune different from the contemporary setting. A version published by Henry Playford (Henry Purcell’s publisher) in the ‘Collection of Original Scotch Tunes’ displays similarities to the contemporary melody. It was often played at the close of gatherings in Scotland. At the end of the eighteenth century, Robert Burns used the older tune to set his poem ‘Adieu! a heart-warm, fond adieu’, and in 1821 Sir Walter Scott published a variant of the song entitled ‘Armstrong’s Goodnight’. A text from an early nineteenth-century Glasgow source, now at the National Library of Scotland, closely resembles the modern song. Between 1840 and 1860 a variant of the song was published in Ireland as ‘The Parting glass’. The modern tune first appears as ‘Sweet Cootehill Town’ in an early twentieth-century collection of Irish songs entitled ‘Old Irish Folk Music and Songs’. It was this Irish melody that nudged aside the original Scottish tune to become one of the most popular ballads in recent history.

from notes by Desmond Earley © 2015