Robin Adair

The melody for this song is “Eileen Aroon” (Eibhlín a Rún), an Irish air so established by the 1740s that it was near-obligatory in Dublin concert repertoire, with variation sets by Matthew Dubourg and arrangements later by Haydn and Beethoven. Romantic tradition traces it to the medieval harper Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh. The “Robin Adair” words are traditionally credited to Lady Caroline Keppel (c. 1734–1769), writing in the 1750s of her socially forbidden love for the Dublin surgeon Robert Adair, whom she eventually married. The song was first printed under this title in the Edinburgh Musical Miscellany (1793) and became a sensation when the tenor John Braham featured it around 1811. Jane Austen gave it a famous cameo in Emma (1815), where Jane Fairfax plays it on her mysteriously gifted pianoforte. John McCormack recorded it for Victor in 1909 and 1912, and the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem recorded the parent song “Eileen Aroon” in 1961.