Have you been at Carrick?
"Have you been at Carrick?", also given as "Were you at the rock?" or, occasionally, "Were you at Carrick?", is the English name of a popular slow air originating in Ireland. The various titles are translations of the first line of the Irish text, "An raibh tú ag an gCarraig". "Have you been at Carrick" is the translation originally made in the 19th century by the Derry-born County Cork poet and Young Irelander, Edward Walsh.
History
The song was well known by the first half of the 19th century, though most authors assume an earlier origin. Early versions of an Irish text, with translations, were printed in Walsh's Irish Popular Songs and John O'Daly's Poets and Poetry of Munster. O'Daly firmly ascribed an 18th-century origin to the song and said it was written by Dominic Ó Mongain, a poet and harpist from County Tyrone, in honour of the society beauty Eliza Blacker of the townland of Carrick in the parish of Seagoe, County Armagh; she later became Lady Dunkin, on marrying Sir William Dunkin of Clogher. Walsh said only that he believed the song to have a "southern" origin, noting that Carrick was a common element in place names, while the song-collector Patrick Weston Joyce confirmed that he had commonly heard it sung in Munster.Text
Walsh described the text as follows: "In this truly Irish song, when the pining swain learns that his absent mistress is not love-sick like himself, he praises the beauty of her copious hair, throws off a glass to her health, enumerates his sufferings, and swears to forgo the sex for ever; but she suddenly bursts upon his view and he greets his glorious maid with such a welcome as an Irish lover alone can give!" The version given by Walsh has six stanzas, or verses, in both Irish and English texts.An alternative translation was made by Walsh's contemporary James Clarence Mangan under the title "The Lass of Carrick".
Tune
The melody, as notated in O’Neill's Music of Ireland, is in the mixolydian mode. This was based on a setting published in O'Daly's Poets and Poetry of Munster in 1849. Another version was published in Irish Music and Song by Joyce, who described O'Daly's setting as "so overladen with ornamental notes that the melody is quite obscured I have given here, without any ornamentation, the simple vocal melody as I knew it from my earliest days". Joyce took the song's text from Edward Walsh's Irish Popular Songs.Another version of the tune was also given by Edward Bunting under the title "Have you seen my Valentine"; O'Neill also printed a major-key variant, "The Charming Fair Maid".
Seán Ó Riada published an analysis of the song which stressed the motivic elements of its construction, showing that much of the melody is based on repetition, inversion or transposition of its opening phrase. Seamus Ennis, who gave many solo performances of the tune and helped popularise it as an instrumental air, noted that it fit the uilleann pipes well.