The Parting Glass

A parting glass, or stirrup cup, was the last drink offered to a guest already in the saddle. In Scotland this was the usual song for the end of a gathering before Burns wrote "Auld Lang Syne." Verses close to the modern ones appear in a Glasgow chapbook printed around 1815 to 1822, then on Irish broadsides in Cork in the 1830s and in Dublin a decade or more later.

The tune it is sung to now first shows up as a fiddle tune, "The Peacock," in James Aird's collection of 1782. P. W. Joyce printed a version in 1909 as "Sweet Cootehill Town" and noted that the air was used as a general farewell tune.