At first glance, it is easy to track the story of She Moved Through The Fair, one of the most haunting and most recorded Irish ballads of all.

It is not very old. Longford poet Padraig Colum wrote it in 1909, using a tune and perhaps a first verse he had found in Donegal. It was likely heard at a session there with music collector Herbert Hughes, or, as has been suggested, transcribed by Hughes from an earlier visit with his brother Fred, John Campbell and Belfast collector and publisher, Francis Joseph Bigger (a great friend of Da McPeake).

The four verses Colum wrote (he claimed to have happened on a first verse and added three) appeared in Irish Country Songs, published by Boosey & Hawkes. There is no trace of it in the dozens of older books by collectors or the library collections of broadsheets sold at country fairs in the 1800s.

This “trad arr” lack of antiquity is not unusual. WB Yeats made Sally Gardens his own, completely replacing the bawdy original and purloining the tune. Dominic Behan’s Carrickfergus bears little resemblance to the original and upends its geography.

Then, in 1970, came some explanatory footnotes in an exchange of letters in a national newspaper, including from Padraig Colum himself.

Hidden treasure trove

There is more to the mysterious disappearing lover than meets the eye.

The young lover departs with “her goods and her gear,” strongly suggesting this is a gypsy or a traveller song.

John Loesberg, authority on Irish folk songs and bouzouki enthusiast, commented, “from its strange, almost Eastern sounding melody, the song appears to be an air of some antiquity.”

Romany families, of which there are very few in Ireland, keep this song in their repertoire. So do travelling community families, of which there are many. Both have a vast song tradition of their own, of which only a small fraction is aired for public consumption. Moved Through The Fair may be one of these, a glimpse into a hidden treasure trove.

Travelling community songstress Margaret Barry was one of those who propelled the song into the folk revival of the 1950s, but when asked by a BBC interviewer if the song had come from the traveller tradition, she replied that she had “learned the song off a gramophone record by John McCormack.”

International appeal

By then there was no stopping She Moved…, moving right through the folk music tradition of Europe and USA, from Joe Brown to Nana Mouskouri. There are over 100 recordings.

As with most ballad storylines, we can draw comparisons with older songs in the tradition: the Bold Forester, Molly Bawn, I Once Had a True Love, Our Wedding Day, Out of the Window. There is much speculation about the cultural references. Is “no two were e’er wed” a reference to elopement, an important feature of rural Ireland when marriages were pre-arranged, with implications for land and wealth, as with the lack of kine/cattle (or even coin in some versions)?

Is “the sorrow that never was said” a reference to TB? And is the young lover returning to tell her suitor he, too, has TB, the great killer of pre-1950s Ireland? Did she return when she was still alive to promise him her hand in marriage, or was it a supernatural visit?

Paddy Tunney, who collected many of his songs in Donegal, produced another version he had learned from his mother with the word gríosach in it. She Moved… is older than Colum.

Pádraig Colum was a genius, regardless. Hollywood directors yearn to create the marvellous erotic tension in that scene in the final verse, “where she leaned and she touched me and this she did say.

“It will not be long, love, until our wedding day.”

Now who cannot identify with that?