The opening four lines are reminiscent of "She Moved Through the Fair" and the second four lines are unmistakably similar. This version was called "I Once Had a True Love". Tunney himself collected one version from an Irish singer called Barney McGarvey. Tunney suggests, however, that it would be more accurate to say that Colum simply added additional lyrics, not the melody, to an original traditional song that by then had generated many variations throughout Ireland. ![]() The traditional singer Paddy Tunney relates how Colum wrote the song after returning from a literary gathering in Donegal with Herbert Hughes and others. In the course of the same Irish Times correspondence, however, another music collector, Proinsias Ó Conluain, said he had recorded a song called "She Went Through the Fair", with words the same as the other three verses of "She Moved Through the Fair", sung by an old man who told him that "the song was a very old one" and that he had learned it as a young man from a basket-weaver in Glenavy. The lyrics were also published in Colum's collection Wild Earth: And Other Poems (1916), though the traditional origin of the final verse is not mentioned there. This extra verse was published in other collections, along with the other three verses. ![]() " and sent it on to Hughes, too late for publication in that particular collection. One verse was not included in the first publication: Colum soon realised that he had not put in the poem the fact that the woman had died before the marriage, and so he wrote the verse that begins: "The people were saying, that no two were e'er wed, but one had a sorrow that never was said. He also described how Herbert Hughes collected the tune and then he, Colum, had kept the last verse of a traditional song and written a couple of verses to fit the music. In a letter published in The Irish Times in 1970, Colum stated that he was the author of all but the final verse. The lyrics were first published in Hughes' Irish Country Songs, published by Boosey & Hawkes in 1909. It has been found both in Ireland and in Scotland, but scraps of the song were first collected in County Donegal by the Longford poet Padraic Colum and the musicologist Herbert Hughes. John Loesberg speculates: "From its strange, almost Eastern sounding melody, it appears to be an air of some antiquity," but he does not define its age any more precisely. She returns as a ghost at night, and repeats the words "it will not be long, love, till our wedding day", intimating her own tragic death and the couple's potential reunion in the afterlife. The narrator sees his lover move away from him through the fair, after telling him that since her family will approve, "it will not be long, love, till our wedding day". " She Moved Through the Fair", also called " She Moves Through the Fair", is a traditional Irish folk song, which exists in a number of versions and has been recorded many times.
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