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Come all ye good people, come by and lend an ear,
It's a sad and a mournful story you quickly shall hear;
It's about a young hero in the height of his bloom,
Who has lost his sweet lfe in a watery tomb.
Bad luck attend you, Percy, wherever you may be,
You would not assist my Johnny for he's drownèd in the sea;
You would leave him for to tumble and to roll in the sea,
In that cold, cold bed of sorrow far away from me.
If you were to hear his mother how bitter she did weep,
For to see his body a-rising and a-floating o'er the deep,
For the loss of her young hero without spot or a stain,
He's the pride all of the family, John Burke was his name.
If you were to hear his sister how bitter she did weep,
If you were to hear his true love how she mourned in her sleep,
Crying, "Johnny, lovely Johnny, shall I never see you more
On that far, far field of glory on the leeward shore?"
"All the ships on yonder ocean will make no motion on the seas,
And the salmon and the trout will forsake their clear streams;
And the birds will leave off singing and the flowers will decay,
Since my Johnny was drownèd in the flurry off Kerry Bay."
The day all of his funeral his true love she was there,
She was dressed all in her rich robes of scarlet so fair
For to view his tender body going down in the clay,
Here's adieu, adieu to Johnny as we all marched away.
Collected in 1960 from Joshua Osborne of Seal Cove, White Bay, NL, by Kenneth Peacock and published in Songs Of The Newfoundland Outports, Volume 2, pp.467-468, by the National Museum of Canada (1965) Crown Copyrights Reserved.
Kenneth Peacock noted that he was unable to find any reference to this lament in the Irish collections at his disposal. Although obviously of late composition, the text is quite good, with many felicitous turns of phrase. The tune had no great beauty, he wrote, but is nevertheless distinctive enough not to be mistaken for any other (unlike so many late Iish tunes).
