Jeanette and Jeannot

DESCRIPTION: "You are going far away from your poor Jeanette. There is no one left to love me now and you too may soon forget." The singer laments her lover's departure to be a soldier. She wishes she had the power to end war
AUTHOR: Words: Charles Jefferys (?? Jefferies (?) / Music: Charles William Glover (1806-1863)
EARLIEST DATE: 1847 (performance advertisements); 1849 (Journal from the Euphrasia, according to Huntington)
KEYWORDS: love separation soldier
FOUND IN: Britain(England(South),Scotland(Aber)) US(MA)
REFERENCES (6 citations):
Huntington-SongsTheWhalemenSang, pp. 245-246, "Genette and Genoe" (1 text, 1 tune)
Greig/Duncan1 102, "Jeannette and Jeaunot" (1 text, 1 tune)
Williams-Wiltshire-WSRO Gl 163, "Jeanette" (1 text)
Shoemaker-MountainMinstrelsyOfPennsylvania, pp. 62-63, "Jeannette and Jeannot"; "Jeannot and Jeannette" (2 texts) (pp. 51-52 in the 1919 edition)
Wolf-AmericanSongSheets, #1086, p. 74, "Jeannette and Jeannot" (2 references)
Dime-Song-Book #3/72, p. 58 and #3/62, p. 57 "Jeanette and Jeannot" (1 text, followed on the same page by "The Answer" to the song)
ST SWMS245 (Partial)
Roud #391
BROADSIDES:
LOCSheet, sm1850 481050, "Jeanette and Jeannot" or "The Conscript's Departure," A. Fiot (Philadelphia), 1850 (text and tune)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Henry and Mary Ann (Henry the Sailor Boy)" (tune, per broadside Bodleian Firth c.12(284))
SAME TUNE:
I've Just Got in Across the Plains (File: Beld345)
The Gold Digger's Lament (File: LDC091)
California As It Is (File: LDC100)
The Mormon Car (File: LDC238)
How Sheridan Whipped Longstreet (by John Ross Dix) ("It was just before the day break, that this famous fight began") (Wolf-AmericanSongSheets p. 62; N.B. Sheridan fought Early, not Longstreet, in the Shenandoah campaign of 1864)
The Northern Girl's Song ("You are marching to the field -- to the field of dreadful fray") (Wolf-AmericanSongSheets p. 110)
Valentine & Julia ("My Julia dear, my dear wife, I'm going to the war," "written by Chas. A. Clark for Valentine L*** of Duryee's Zouaves") (Wolf-AmericanSongSheets p. 164)
ALTERNATE TITLES:
The Conscript's Departure
NOTES [336 words]: Huntington's notes attribute this to Charles Glover and Charles Jeffries, and date it to the late eighteenth century. This led to a dating error in earlier versions of the Index (pointed out to me by Martin Graebe, who gave me much of the information in this entry). But it seems there is much more to say.
My sources do not agree on whether the (co-)author's last name was "Jeffreys," "Jefferys," "Jeffries," or "Jefferies." His poetry was not a great success; I have located only two other poems by him. One is a response to this, "Jeannot's Answer" (for which see Hazel Felleman The Best Loved Poems of the American People, which also contains a full text of "Jeannette and Jannot") and "We Have Lived and Loved Together" (also in Felleman). The contemporary advertisements found by Graebe spell the name "Jefferys."
Charles William Glover, the author of the tune, is easier to trace; he is also credited with the tune of "The Rose of Tralee" and possibly "Kitty Tyrrell." He seems to have been a moderately successful violinist and author of show tunes.
Graebe tells me that the 1847-1848 advertisements for this piece mention "three related songs which they grouped as 'Songs of a Conscript':"
* Jeannette's Song -- "You are going far away, far away, from poor Jeanette" (Roud #391)
* Jeannot's Song -- "Cheer up, cheer up, my own Jeannette" (Roud #13856)
* Jeanette and Jeannot, Duet -- "From the field of fight returning" (Roud #V6807), also known as The Soldier's Return
"One advert claimed 'From the Palace to the cottage, these songs will force their way everywhere; they are just the thing for a world-wide popularity.'"
There are mysterious hints that there was a "Jeanette and Jeannot" song before Glover wrote his tune, which may have been the source of Huntington's date, but I cannot point to anything concrete. - RBW, MG
Broadside Bodleian, Firth b.26(472), "Answer to Jeannette and Jeannot" ("Cheer up, cheer up my own Jeannette"), J. Wilson (Bideford), n.d. is [another version of the] sequel. - BS
Last updated in version 6.6
File: SWMS245

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