Foggy Dew

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“Foggy Dew” (or “The Foggy Dew”) is the name of two distinct songs common in Ireland. The earlier version (of English origin, sometimes called “Foggy, Foggy Dew”), is a lamentful ballad of a young lover.

When I was a bachelor, airy and young, I followed the roving trade,

And the only harm that ever I did was courting a servant maid.

I courted her all summer long, and part of the winter, too

And many's the time I rode my love all over the foggy dew.

The song has some of the elements of the common rake archetype that is repeated throughout many Irish folk songs, in which a young man (often a soldier) comes to a young maid in the middle of the night, leaving her “in the family way”, and, in fact, leaving her for good. In this song, however, it is the maid who comes to the young man's bed, "for fear of the foggy dew", and it is she that leaves him and marries another man (who is blissfully unaware that his wife had a relation with another man). Ewan MacColl, who recorded this song, states that the original words had it as the "bugaboo" that the maid feared.

This version was published on a broadside around 1815, though Burl Ives, who popularized the song in the 1940s, claimed that it dated to colonial America. Ives was once jailed in Mona, Utah, for singing it in public, when authorities deemed it a bawdy song.

The other song called “Foggy Dew” has alternately been attributed to Peadar Kearney, who also wrote “Amhrán na bhFiann” (“Soldier's Song”), the national anthem of the Republic of Ireland, and to one Canon Charles O’Neill, with no side providing better sources to actual authorship than the other. This song chronicles the Easter Uprising of 1916, and encourages Irishmen to fight for the cause of Ireland, rather than of England, as so many young men were doing in World War I.

'Twas England bade our wild geese go

That small nations might be free;

Their lonely graves are by Suvla's waves

On the fringe of the great North Sea.

But had they died by Pearse's side

Or fought with Valera true,

Their graves we'd keep where the Fenians sleep,

'Neath the hills of the foggy dew.

Some versions mention Cathal Brugha, another nationalist later killed in the Irish Civil War, and whose name fits the meter better, rather than Valera. The song in general, but more visibly in its last verse (not included in many versions, and possibly written later), takes a backward look at it all and sadly contemplates the tragedy of those wars, and those who died in them. The last verse is as follows :

As back through the Glen, I rode again,

And my heart wi' grief was sore

For I parted then with gallant men

Whom I never shall see more.

But to and fro in my dreams I go,

And I kneel and pray for you,

For slavery fled, O glorious dead,

When you fell in the Foggy dew

This song (also sometimes known as “Down the Glen”) has been performed and recorded by most well-known Irish folk groups, including The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, The Dubliners, The Chieftains with Sinéad O'Connor, and the Wolfe Tones.

The Foggy Dew is also the name of an Irish Rebel/Irish Folk Band from Glasgow

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