Arrangement - Sally Gardens

[bracalea]

Does anyone this arrangement of Down by the Sally Gardens? Really want to sing it but can't find the arranger/arrangement. https://open.spotify.com/track/2zhvULiS2gJLdOezwhecyy

[bracalea]

It's a link to Robert Merrill singing Down by the Sally Gardens

[zamyrabyrd]

Hi and welcome!

I couldn't open your link but here is Merrill singing 7 folk songs one of which is the Salley Gardens, probably the same version you cited.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOSz9R--Bo8

These are not the artistic arrangements by Benjamin Britten that are more often used, so you might check them out at a music store or buy them online as they are copyright protected.

Here is a good article about Britten's transcriptions. Rather than just harmonizing the melodies he conveys the atmosphere in a kind of tone painting. Actually, I was not aware of the following until reading it now:

The Salley Gardens

"Ironically, the first folksong isn't really a folksong. Unhelpfully, Britten subtitles the song as "Irish Tune".  The text is by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet and dramatist and one of the greatest poets in the English language of the twentieth century. He was a leader of the "Irish Renaissance" and spiritualist, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. It was published in 1889 in "The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems".

Yeats indicated in a note that it was "an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballisodare, Sligo, who often sings them to herself." Yeats's original title, "An Old Song Re-Sung", reflected this; it first appeared under its present title when it was reprinted in Poems in 1895

The melody is by Northern Irish Composer Herbert Hughes, whose Down by the Sally Gardens was published in 1909 in "Irish Country Songs Vol. 1", who originally used the text by Yeats. True, his accompaniment is clumsy and fussy, but he created the essence of the song. Britten's "resetting" gives us the opportunity to appreciate the gem in all it's glory.

All through The Sally Gardens the accompaniment suggests the slow falling of tears and – you will notice this at once when you hear the song – the introduction, at the start, of a note contradicting the key is a masterly touch. The gentle throb of the quaver pattern is broken by a sad little figure, but follows the natural rhythm of Yeats' poem perfectly. A song both static and somehow "suspended" in time, a moment of reflection captured in space and time, this is a truly remarkable creation. A very effective "flattening" of the harmony on the final "young and foolish" is an expressive masterstroke of a composer acutely attuned to the mood and emotion of the text. The tiny postlude sums up the sadness of an older protagonist who remembers his/her own youth and the loss of love.

The Latin name for the Weeping Willow is the Salix, and willows are sometimes referred to in poetry as "weeping Salleys". The Irish name for a willow is "Saileach". "Salley Gardens" then could refer to a secluded willow grove where lover's could tryst in secret and seclusion."

ZB

[Monsieur Croche]

Go for the Britten arrangement, by all means. It is wonderfully effective in conveying the song while coloring it with that much more nostalgia and pathos -- which leaves it, imo, that much more memorable to your audience once they have heard it. It is also as simple and uncluttered as it is effective, putting the line (and the singer) that much more front and center.

(That said, you may desire a more traditional 'folk song-like' harmonization... not just a matter of preference but for programming reasons and / or in anticipating your audience.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxDD9mgcLZ0


Best regards