The Harp That Once

Thomas Moore’s lament for Ireland’s silenced glory, published in the first number of his Irish Melodies (1808), set to the eighteenth-century air “Gramachree,” also known as “Molly Asthore.” The air was in circulation by the 1740s and carried a busy prior life: it served as a British march in the Revolutionary War era, appears in Scotland as “Will Ye Go to Flanders?”, and was used in Thomas Linley’s 1775 comic opera The Duenna. Both Ireland and Scotland claim the melody, a dispute already running in the nineteenth century. In the living tradition it survives as a slow air and march in G, and it was entered in the manuscript collection of Nova Scotia fiddler James Barry (1819–1906), evidence of its reach into Maritime Canada.