The Parting Glass

"The Parting Glass" is a Scottishtraditional song, often sung at the end of a gathering of friends. It was purportedly the most popular parting song sung in Scotland before Robert Burns wrote "Auld Lang Syne".

The earliest known printed version was as a broadside in the 1770s and it first appeared in book form in "Scots Songs" by Herd. An early version is sometimes attributed to Sir Alex Boswell. The text is doubtless older than its 1770 appearance in broadside, as it was recorded in the Skene Manuscript, a collection of Scottish airs written at various dates between 1615 and 1635. It was known at least as early as 1605, when a portion of the first stanza was written in a farewell letter, as a poem now known as "Armstrong's Goodnight", by one of the Border Reivers executed that year for the murder in 1600 of Sir John Carmichael, Warden of the Scottish West March.

Exact lyrics vary between arrangements, but they include most, if not all, of the following stanzas appearing in different orders:

I spent it in good company

And all the harm I've ever done

Alas it was to none but me

And all I've done for want of wit

To mem'ry now I can't recall

So fill to me the parting glass

Good night and joy be to you all

And drink a health whate’er befall,

And gently rise and softly call

Good night and joy be to you all

They're sorry for my going away

And all the sweethearts that e'er I had

They'd wish me one more day to stay

That I should rise and you should not

I gently rise and softly call

Good night and joy be to you all

A man may fight and not be slain

A man may court a pretty girl

And perhaps be welcomed back again

But since it has so ought to be

By a time to rise and a time to fall

Come fill to me the parting glass

Good night and joy be with you all

The earliest known appearance of the tune today associated with this text is as a fiddle tune called "The Peacock", included in James Aird's A Selection of Scots, English, Irish and Foreign Airs, vol. 2 (1782).

Patrick Weston Joyce, in his Old Irish Folk Music and Songs (1909), gives the tune with a different text under the name "Sweet Cootehill Town," noting, "The air seems to have been used indeed as a general farewell tune, so that—from the words of another song of the same class—it is often called 'Good night and joy be with you all.'" The celebrated Irish folk song collector Colm O Lochlainn has taken note of this identity of melodies between "The Parting Glass" and "Sweet Cootehill Town". "Sweet Cootehill Town" is another traditional farewell song, this time involving a man leaving Ireland to go to America.

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