MAGGIE-"When You and I Were Young”

🎧 Best Listened With Headphones 🎧 - This is my guitar cover of: “Maggie - When You and I Were Young” one of the most enduring sentimental ballads of the nineteenth century, a song whose apparent simplicity conceals a deeply personal and tragic origin. First published with music in 1866, the song is based on a poem written two years earlier by the Canadian schoolteacher George Washington Johnson, and set to music by his friend, the English-American composer James Austin Butterfield. Johnson wrote the original poem in 1864 while living in Hamilton, Ontario. He had fallen in love with one of his pupils, Margaret “Maggie” Clark, who was three years his junior. During this period Maggie was suffering from tuberculosis, then a lingering and often fatal illness. According to Johnson’s own accounts, the poem was composed during a walk along the Niagara escarpment, overlooking the creek and mill at Twenty Mile Creek below. The landscape named in the song is therefore not symbolic or imagined, but specific and local: the hill, the creek, the “creaking old mill,” and the vanished green grove all belonged to the couple’s everyday world. The poem first appeared in Johnson’s 1864 collection *Maple Leaves*. It reflects on the passage of time, the fading of youth, and the hope that love might endure even as the body weakens. Tragically, that hope was soon tested. George and Maggie married on October 21, 1864, but Maggie’s health continued to decline, and she died on May 12, 1865, at the age of just twenty-three. For Johnson, Maggie would forever remain young, preserved in memory and in verse. In 1866, James Austin Butterfield set the poem to music. Butterfield, who worked in the United States (notably Indianapolis and Chicago), gave the text a gently flowing melody that perfectly matched its reflective tone. The published sheet music spread rapidly, and the song became enormously popular on both sides of the Atlantic, remaining a staple of parlour singing well into the early twentieth century. For the recording I made use of VSTHost. See https://vintage-sounds.freeforums.net/ No copyright infringement intended. Videos are made purely for entertainment. Music and images belongs to their rightful owners. Note: This song is the property and copyright of its rightful owner(s) and ,, I '' claim no ownership of the lyrics or the song. This is a non-profit video made solely for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis Lyrics When You And I Were Young, Maggie. Music by J.A. Butterfield Lyric by Geo. W. Johnson Published 1866 [Verse 1] I wan-der'd to-day to the hill, Mag-gie, To watch the scene be-low, The creek and the creak-ing old mill, Mag-gie, As we used to long a-go. The green grove is gone from the hill, Mag-gie, Where first the dai-sies sprung; The creak-ing old mill is still, Mag-gie, Since you and I were young. [Chorus] And now we are a-ged and gray, Mag-gie, And the tri-als of life near-ly done, Let us sing of the days that are gone, Mag-gie, When you and I were young. [Verse 2] A cit-y so si-lent and lone, Mag-gie, Where the young and the gay and the best, In pol-ished white man-sions of stone, Mag-gie, Have each found a place of rest, Is built where the birds used to play, Mag-gie, And join in the songs that were sung; For we sang as gay as they, Mag-gie, When you and I were young. [Chorus] [Verse 3] They say I am fee-ble with age, Mag-gie, My steps are less spright-ly than then, My face is a well writ-ten page, Mag-gie, But time a-lone was the pen, They say we are a-ged and gray, Mag-gie, As spray by the white break-ers flung; But to me you're as fair as you were, Mag-gie, When you and I were young.