She Moved Through the Fair - Folksong or Fakesong?

Is She Moved Through the Fair really a folk song, or is it an early 20th Century parlour song?  The answer to this question takes us deep into Irish social and cultural history and we meet some colourful characters along the way. But our journey's end is a cottage fireside where, in the space of just a few minutes, a woman and two men unwittingly sparked a musical phenomenon.

Music

In addition to She Moved Through the Fair, this episode includes the following music:

The opening music is Eleanor Plunkett by Turlough O’Carolan

The music accompanying Padraic Colum’s words is The Frost is All Over, a tune from Donegal

The piano version of She Moved Through the Fair is Herbert Hughes’s arrangement, published in his book Irish Country Songs vol 1 in 1909. It is followed by an excerpt from La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin by Claude Debussy. Like many parlour pianos, mine is greatly in need of tuning.

The harp tune behind the words of Herbert Hughes is The Airy Bachelor, a tune he also collected in Kilmacrenan, Donegal on the same trip on which he and Colum first heard She Moved Through the Fair.

There’s a verse of “The Grey Cock” played on piano.

The reading of “My Own Rod’s The Sorest” or “Out of the Window” uses the verses reconstructed by Hugh Shields (see below). The tune played is the one originally collected by Herbert Hughes (see below)

The final version of She Moved Through the Fair is the version my Mum taught me, apart from the final verse - I've never heard her sing the final verse.

All music performed by Jenny Shaw.

Acknowledgements

As always I’d like to express my thanks to the team at Stones Barn, Cumbria and the Barnstoners community, who are always supportive and encouraging, and to Steven, Cai and Eleanor Shaw who remain supportive despite having to listen to my nonstop singing and whistling.

References

The song was first published by Herbert Hughes in The Journal of the Irish Folk Song Society in 1905.

A free PDF version of Herbert Hughes’ Irish Country Songs

A copy of Wild Earth by Padraic Colum 

There’s an interesting article on Irish sean-nos singing here 

She Moved Through the Fair in Fresno State’s Ballad Index

Mainly Norfolk’s article about She Moved Through the Fair.

Article about Colum in the Irish Times

Lots of versions of the song; sheet music and video

An article about Margaret Barry from The Guardian:

Pickering, M. (1990). Review of The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour, by D. Scott. Popular Music, 9(3), 381–384. http://www.jstor.org/stable/853333 

Shields, H. (1975). The Proper Words: A Discussion on Folk Song and Literary Poetry. Irish University Review, 5(2), 274–291. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25477077 

Transcript

*This transcript includes bonus material that was cut from the final podcast*

Today’s song is a bit like one of those magic pictures that used to be given away in cereal packets in the 80s – in the UK anyway. I don’t know if you remember them. You’d look at it one way and you’d see a peaceful jungle scene. You look at it another way – aaah, there’s a tiger.

Looked at one way, this song is simply an Edwardian song that was popular in drawing rooms in the first part of the 20th Century, a pastiche of a folk song to amuse the growing middle class. Looked at another way, it’s a lovingly reconstructed fragment of an old song and a conscious attempt to reassert a culture under threat of extinction. 

Either way, it’s a song that has been adopted and adapted widely, subject to a modern version of the oral tradition over the last 60 years. It has exerted a peculiar hold on popular culture; it pops up in films and in chart songs, and I’m sure it’s because even the first line of the melody, played slowly on a whistle or pipes hits you right between the eyes with a vision of rural Ireland. See what you think…

[MUSIC – first line of song on whistle]

It’s also a song that seems to attract an inordinate amount of reverb.

It is of course She Moved Through the Fair.

On a personal level, this is another song from my childhood because it’s one of my Mum’s favourites. She’d sing it sometimes at family get togethers, and she taught it to me when I was putting my first set lists together as a teenager. 

I asked her about it recently, hoping she’d say that she learned it from her Gran, who was from an Irish family. That would have made a great story, but it turns out she first heard it at her university folk club. Great grandma Conroy could sing traditional music, but her speciality was more in the line of mouth music, which she learned from her mother.

In fact the song can only be reliably traced back to the first decade of the 20th Century, and there’s been something of a custody battle between its named author and those who would like to claim it for the oral tradition, some of which was played out in the letter’s page of the Irish Times during a lively correspondence in 1970.

That author was the writer Padraic Colum. Colum was born in Longford, Ireland, in 1881 and then moved to Dublin, though later in life he lived for many years in the United States. Throughout his long life he wrote constantly - poetry, plays, and both adult and children’s fiction, often drawing on Irish folklore and tradition as his inspiration. 

One of his books for children, The King of Ireland’s Son, began as a translation of a Gaelic story but expanded into an epic journey undertaken by the book’s hero, weaving together a number of traditional stories throughout the long saga.

Later in life Colum travelled extensively and, as a distinguished writer and a folklorist, he was commissioned to write two books based on Polynesian folklore. He travelled to Hawaii in 1923 and over the following two years published At the Gateways of the Day, and The Bright Island.

Later, returning to Europe, he resumed his longstanding friendship with James Joyce and was involved in the transcription of Finnegan’s Wake.

There was a strong political dimension to Colum’s work. Early in his career, he joined the Gaelic League, a society dedicated to De-Anglicising Ireland and restoring the Irish language. His first poems were published in The United Irishman, an Irish nationalist newspaper. With Ireland still a part of the British Empire, cultural nationalism could be a powerful act of resistance, a way to retain and strengthen a cultural identity.

For the purposes of our story, it’s Colum’s work as a folk song collector that is most significant. But the rest of his story is important too I think. His poetry, plays and stories may have sunk into obscurity, but he remains a credible writer steeped in Irish culture and cultural revival. He saw himself as a man of the people – the peasant poet – giving his writing a natural style and drawing on Irish culture.

And so we come to She Moved Through the Fair.

In a letter to the Irish Times in 1970, towards the end of his life, Colum gives his account of how the song came into being:

[Frost is All Over here – whistle and DADGAD]

“Forty or fifty years ago Herbert Hughes and myself made a walking tour through part of Donegal. Herbert had a fiddle, and after we were invited to sit by the fire in one of the cottages, he would play something which would lead to someone in the house remarking, ‘I have a song like that’, or ‘Uncle knows that song’. Among songs that were sung to us, this one, to a really beautiful air, ended:

            I dreamt it last night that my young love came in

            So softly she entered her feet made no din

            She came close beside me, and this she did say,

            It will not be long, love, till our wedding day

It may have been that it was “my dead love” and that “she came close beside me”. The rest of the verses were clumsy and I don’t know that either of us wrote them down.”

In fact it had been sixty six years since Colum and Hughes made trip. Colum, inspired by the encounter, went on to write an original poem leading up to that crucial final verse. It is short, vivid and ambiguous, especially in the original three-verse version. The second verse is the most distinctive and perhaps stands out as the mark of a professional poet.

By the time we get to the third verse we can’t be sure if the bride is a ghost or just a dream, and there is little narrative, just three scenes suspended in time. 

Perhaps that is the secret of the song’s success. Each verse instantly conjures up the scene but the singer or listener is left to connect them together. 

In 1922, in book Wild Earth and other poems, Colum offers a reworked version of the song. In this version, it’s her brothers that won’t mind, and there are other small edits. Interestingly, this is where “she went through the fair”, the line in the 1909 version, becomes “she moved through the fair”. He also gives us a new verse, as verse 3.

The people were saying no two were e’er wed
 But one had a sorrow that never was said
 And I smiled as she passed with her goods and her gear
 And that was the last that I saw of my dear

According to his own letter to the Irish Times, Colum wrote this verse soon after but was not able to get it to Hughes in time for publication. He says that he wrote it to make it clear that the young love had died rather than left. However, to my mind it sounds more as though she’s gathering up her possessions and leaving.

Colum was looking back on the song’s origin after many years, but Hughes didn’t leave it so long to give his account. In the archives of the Irish Folk Song Society we can find further, and slightly different, details of the song as it was first collected. Published in the society’s journey in 1905 were three songs that Hughes had collected the year before, one of which is his source material for She Moved Through the Fair. It’s under a much less romantic and somewhat cryptic title, “My Own Rod’s the Sorest”, and here’s what Hughes has to say:

[This tune on harp]

“I took down this air from the singing of Annie MacGallaglay of Tearmann, in the barony of Kilmacrenan, last September. It was with great difficulty I recorded the melody at all, and even now I am afraid it is only approximately correct, for “Bucklety’s woman” (as she is known) sang this with a great many twists and turns in the tune, and with what are known to some as “quarter tones” here and there. She is one of the finest traditional singers I have ever heard.

Equally of interest, Hughes publishes an additional verse to the one that piqued Colum’s interest:

I onst had a sweetheart, I loved her right well
 I loved her far better than my tongue can tell
 Her parents do slight me for the want of gear
 Adieu to all pleasure since I lost my dear.

Herbert Hughes was born and raised in Belfast, and was known to be a collector of traditional tunes from at least the age of 21. Although he composed some music of his own, arranging traditional melodies was his passion and he poured his time into it, publishing four volumes of his collection Irish Country Songs, and other collections including songs of Ulster.

His arrangements were influenced by new trends in classical music, which aligned well with his own strong feelings towards traditional tunes and what they represented. In the introduction to his first volume of Irish Country Songs – the volume that includes She Moved Through the Fair, he includes some reflections on the words and music he has collected and on folk music in general. It’s obvious from these works that he has an informed and pragmatic approach to Irish folk music and that he is no sentimentalist. 

He writes:

“Musical art is gradually releasing itself from the tyranny of the tempered scale. If composers find its restrictions to exacting - well and good… The is no reason why an arbitrarily fixed scale should stand in the way of the musical revolutionary. That it is merely arbitrary history shows clearly enough, and if we examine the work of the modern French school, notably that of M. Claude Debussy, it will be seen that the tendency is to break the bonds of this old slave-driver and return to the freedom of primitive scales.

“This question, then, of untempered scales is not new; it is as old as the sun and the moon and the stars. Musical scholars, as well as political experts, are apt to forget that the history of Ireland is not the history of England. They forget that over a thousand years ago Ireland was the most highly educated country in Western Europe, and that even in her decadence she has retained some of this old knowledge and culture; and as a consequence, her contemporary literature and folk music still have qualities that are peculiar to her, and do not quickly respond to the influence of antipathetic forces. In recording her folk music one is always meeting with this independence – I would almost say, isolation. Over and over again I have found it impossible to write down a tune that has been sung or played to me, for the simple reason that our modern notation does not allow for intervals less than a semitone." 

[HH arrangement fragment – piano only]

We can hear similarities to Debussy’s style in La fille aux cheveux de lin, written by Debussy in the same year

[excerpt of La fille]

So while the melody might be traditional, his arrangement would have sounded modern at the time of publication – an art song that would have taken its place alongside so many others in the parlours of the growing middle class.

And yet his style of arrangement and the influence of a modern French style comes directly from his ideology and beliefs about Irish traditional music. He made his arrangement at a time when sean-nos – or old style – singing was starting to be recognised and defined as a musical style in its own right, distinct from the classical tradition and from English art songs. And his introduction makes it clear that it is this vocal style he is striving to capture.

His arrangement could also be seen as a political act. Under the guise of a current musical trend, he was consciously attempting to decolonise the music of his native land by restoring its unique qualities as best he could.

But, surely many of those who bought his book would sing the song in the Western classical style at their parlour piano.

Like so many things with this song, it is a contradiction.

[HH arrangement with vocals – verse 1] 

A recording of this song was made by Irish tenor John McCormack in 1941. Although it wasn’t the first recording to be made of She Moved Through the Fair, it was popular and very influential – and well worth a listen. It provides a rare opportunity to hear the whole of the Hughes piano arrangement which has largely been abandoned these days. John McCormack’s version is sometimes credited with introducing “my dead love” in the last verse, and it may have been this that caught the mood of the age. It’s easy enough to suspect this might have had something to do with the war that was raging across Europe.

The song was from then on fixed as a ghost story, the lover returning from the dead at night, just as in other songs such as Lowlands and the Grey Cock, though the returned lover is usually male in these songs.

[musical interlude]

In the 1950s, a unique character burst on to the emerging London folk scene. Born in Cork, and earning her living by busking since the age of 16, Margaret Barry was a formidable character by all accounts. I also busked from the ages of 16 to 22, usually solo and sometimes for subsistence money, so I can appreciate some of the things she faced as a young female street musician. But I always had a safe place to go back to and a family to fall back on; Margaret did not. So if her singing was loud and her manner forceful, it was because it needed to be. And if she became a popular act, it was because her life had depended on it.

Margaret Barry first met the folk song collector Alan Lomax in Dundalk in 1951, which led to her moving to London where she took the capital by slowly and surely by storm. She quickly went from entertaining Irish ex-pats in London pubs to recording a number of popular albums, and by the 60s she was performing at folk festivals alongside the likes of Bob Dylan (who she apparently described as “smelly”).

It seems fitting that the song she was best known for was “She Moved Through the Fair”. If the song is a contradiction, then so was Margaret Barry. Dubbed “The Queen of the Gypsies” there’s some dispute as to whether her family had been travellers before she took to the road, though they were certainly musicians. And it turns out she learned the song not from her family or from fellow travellers, but from the recording made by John McCormack which she heard in a shop doorway.

Most of the modern versions can be traced back to her in one way or another, as she seems to be the person that most popularised it within the growing British folk scene where it really took root. Early versions were recorded by Anne Briggs, Davy Graham, Sandy Denny and Fairport Convention among others, and from then on too many versions even to count.

[music – piano version in Fairport style]

But one mystery remains. What was the song that Colum and Hughes heard in Donegal in 1904? Where did it all begin?

The Irish music specialist Hugh Shields has pieced together a song that he proposes as a source for She Moved Through the Fair, using Hughes two verses as a guide. To do so he draws on songs collected in Donegal and Derry and which are still sung to this day. The Donegal version uses the line “my own rod is sorest” – which is the unusual title of Hughes’s tune as originally published.

Oh once I had a sweetheart and I loved her well,

I loved her far better than my tongue can tell 

Her parents they did slight me for the want of gear

And adieu to all pleasure since I lost my dear

I dreamed last night that my true love came in

And she walked up to slowly that her feet made no din

I thought that she spoke and unto me did say

It will not be long, love, until our wedding day

So according to promise at midnight I rose

I could find nothing there but the downfolded clothes

The sheets they were empty as plain as you see

And out of the window with another went she

Oh Molly, lovely Molly, what is this you have done?

You have pulled the thristle, you’ve left the red rose behind

But the thristle will wither and fade away soon

While the red rose will flourish in the sweet month of June

Was I a fisherman living by the seaside

And my love a salmon rolling in with the tide

I would cast out my fish-net, catch her in a snare

I’d bring home lovely Molly, I vow and declare

Or was I an eagle and had wings for to fly

I would fly to my love’s castle and there I would lie

On a bed of green laurel I would leave myself down

And with my fond wings I would my love surround

Or if I was in yonder valley where the small birds do sing

And no one to be near me till I’d cry my fill

Since the notion it took me to have my own will

Sure, my own rod is sorest and does beat me still

So it’s early in the morning to my shop I do go

I cast on my loom while my shuttle I throw

There nothing does ail me only innocent love

And I hope to be rewarded by the girl that I love

This, then, is something like the song that Colum and Hughes first heard, and it’s not a ghost story. It’s the story of a man abandoned by the girl he loves, and his suffering as a result. It’s similar to the family of songs that includes Handsome Molly, Loving Hannah and Pretty Saro. In fact some of the verses here are what’s known as floating verses – they appear in several songs. I’ve not included all of them here, but there’s one that begins “Or was I an eagle, had wings for to fly”. One I did include begins “Or if I was in yonder valley where the small birds do sing”. Versions of both these verses can be found in Pretty Saro.

Termon in Kilmacrenan, Donegal, is a rural area with megalithic tombs, standing stones, stone crosses and sacred wells. It’s sort of place that I’m sure is conjured up in people’s minds when they hear the song, so both writer and musician have done their work well. What may be less apparent is the song’s political backdrop.

When I first started researching this song, I thought it would lead to an interesting debate about what makes a song a folk song, and I’m sure that’s something that we’ll tackle in future episodes. Instead I found a rich and intriguing story particular to this song, set against a backdrop of cultural revival. This, it seems, was not a drawing room pastiche of a folk song but a good faith attempt to reassert an ancient culture that had been all but lost due to English colonisation.

In 1904, a writer and a musician happened to be in the right place at the right time to hear a remarkable and moving example of Irish traditional singing, though with English words. From those few short minutes, they went on to create one of Ireland’s most iconic songs.

Hughes, the musician, understood and appreciated the musical style he heard there, and drew on an exciting new trend in French music – Impressionism – to capture and arrange the distinctiveness of the tune.

Colum, the writer, was largely unimpressed with the verses he heard, but he found the vision of a young woman visiting her betrothed in the middle of the night, curiously appealing. It inspired him to write her a back-story, coming to see her as a tragic heroine who died in her beauty and her prime and came sneaking back quietly as a ghost. Perhaps in some ways she represented his own beliefs about Irish culture at the turn of the 20th Century.