Young One I Sought, The

DESCRIPTION: ";Tis a pity I came where my name Was unknown in the town, Where no one could tell how so well I had earned renown." If they had, "the young one I sought" would have liked him better. Since he gets no respect, "to Cashel I'm going"
AUTHOR: Maurice Walsh ? (See NOTES)
EARLIEST DATE: 1926 (Walsh, The Key Above the Door)
KEYWORDS: courting travel rejection
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Shoemaker-MountainMinstrelsyOfPennsylvania, pp. 298-299, "The Young One I Sought" (1 text)
Roud #15025
NOTES [258 words]: Shoemaker calls this a "Song of the Shanty-Men on the Coudersport Pike, Clinton County." But the *precise same two verses,* and *only* those two verses, appear in Maurice Walsh's The Key Above the Door (p. 201 in the 1926 edition on Google Books; it's in Chapter XVIII; according to Benet, p. 1184, it was published [in a magazine serial] in 1923; the Google Books edition is the first book version). They seem to have been printed in several other Walsh books, and I can find no earlier printing.
Walsh calls it "To Cashel I'm Going" and calls it "a fast air with a cry in it" and "a jig tune... and... a lament as well."
The obvious suspicion is that this is another of the song that Shoemaker presents as traditional despite being a recent composition. In this case, it would clearly still have been in copyright -- unless Shoemaker was trying to deprive Walsh of the right to the poem, in which case he would lose unless he had documentation of the earlier existence, which I doubt.
I'm amazed it wasn't caught. Walsh (1879-1964) was a fairly big name -- his short story "The Quiet Man" was the source of the movie of the same name. The Key Above the Door was his first novel, and according to Benet, p. 1184, it sold a hundred thousand copies -- pretty good for a novel by an unknown Irish author!
More recently, Walsh seems to have been largely forgotten; although the first edition of Benet includes him, the later ones do not, and neither do any of my more recent Dictionaries of Literature, nor my two Histories of Irish literature. - RBW
Bibliography

Benet: William Rose Benet, editor, The Reader's Encyclopdedia, first edition, 1948

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File: Shoe298

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