For some time I have
been mistakenly telling people that this song was composed by Irish
musician, Davy Spillane, a virtuoso of the uilleann pipes. (The
uilleann pipes are the Irish version of the bagpipes and the bellows
are inflated by operating a set of bellows positioned between the
elbow and the torso.) Davy Spillane has certainly recorded it but
apparently the song was collected in the 1960’s from an Irish
travelling lady called Mary Duke. My apologies for my error and
thanks to Michael Crowe who first alerted me to my mistake.
I first heard the song
sung, not by Davy Spillane, but by a Lincolnshire duo I admire very
much, Bill Whaley and Dave Fletcher. The song is about a young man of
the travelling community who has a drink problem, which is probably
why she leaves him.
I confess to a couple
of word changes for the benefit of English audiences who may not
speak the Irish language. In the original, the young man is going to
search the ‘boreens’ but I preferred to sing ‘forests’. Just
to confuse things even more, I nowadays sing ‘back lanes’ rather
than ‘forests’, this being a reasonable translation of ‘boreens’.
Also, the young man refers to his sweetheart as Molly Bawn ‘astoreen’
i.e. Molly Bawn, ‘my little dark haired one’. As that was too
long to fit the tune I changed it to Molly Bawn ‘my dear’, again
a reasonable translation of the Irish original.
My apologies to anyone
who objects to singers changing the words; I guess I just don’t
like singing things which my audience won’t understand...but I’ve
tried to retain the sense of the original.