Kate Kearney

Lady Morgan — the novelist Sydney Owenson (c. 1781–1859) — wrote this song around 1807 about the legendarily bewitching Kate Kearney “who lives on the banks of Killarney,” but the melody is older: it appears as “The Beardless Boy” in Bunting’s General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music (1796) and as “The Dissipated Youth” in his 1809 volume. O’Farrell set the tune in 6/8 around 1810, and it was later flattened into a parlor waltz — Francis O’Neill grumbled that the waltz’s added second part was “devoid of any trace of Irish feeling.” The tune traveled widely in both forms through Clinton, Haverty, the Hibernia Collection, and O’Neill’s own books.