The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #72121   Message #2497201
Posted By: kytrad (Jean Ritchie)
18-Nov-08 - 06:42 PM
Thread Name: Origins/ADD: Meet Me Tonight in the Moonlight
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Meet Me Tonight in the Moonlight
I knew this from our earliest old breakable recordings played on a wind-up Victrola. It began:

O I'm thinking tonight of my Blue--eyes
Who is sailing far over the sea,
O I'm thinking tonight of you only
And I wonder if you ever think of me

O I wish I had someone to love me,
Some one that would call me their own.
O I wish I had someone to live for,
For I'm tired of living alone.

O meet me tonight in the moonlight
Just out in the moonlight alone
For I have a sad story to tell you,
Must be told in the moonlight alone.

I'll be carried to the new jail tomorrow,
Leaving my poor darling alone
With those cold prison bars all around me
And my head on a pillar of stone. (referrs to a pillow, I think)

O if I had the wings of an angel
Over these prison walls I would fly,
I would fly to the arms of my darling
And there I'd be willing to die.

The first verse was thrown in every two verses or so, as a kind of chorus. I remember wondering, as a little girl, how "Blue Eyes could meet him in the moonlight when she was sailing far over the sea, and then deciding that, since he'd lost that first sweetheart, he was in the next verses trying to get another!