About this tune

Jerome’s Farewell was quite popular among fiddlers from the Eastern half of PEI in 1991-2, but by 2006 it had largely fallen out of favor. It had often been played in tandem with another reel in D called Homeward Bound.

Jerome’s Farewell is a variant of the well known Irish tune, Boys of the Lough. An early appearance in print for the latter was in The Roche Collection of Traditional Irish Music (1912); famed Irish fiddler Michael Coleman (1891-45) recorded a seminal version of the tune in 1932. Don Messer recorded the tune as Jerome’s Farewell to Gibraltar relatively early in his career, and included a version with that title in a collection entitled Original Old Tyme Music (1942).

Notation for this tune as played by Leonard McDonald is in Fiddle Music of Prince Edward Island.