“She Moved Through the Fair” (Roud 861) (also called “Our Wedding Day“)is a traditional Irish folk song, with a number of iterations, that has been performed and recorded by various artists. 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] ’til our wedding day”. She returns as a ghost at night, and repeats the words again, intimating her own tragic death and the couple’s potential reunion in the afterlife. There are numerous alternate versions, some sung about a male lover, with different lyrics, such as “Our Wedding Day” and “My Young Love Said to Me”, among others.
“She Moved Through the Fair” has been found both in Ireland and in Scotland, but pieces of the song were apparently first collected in County Donegal by Longford poet Padraic Colum and the musicologist Herbert Hughes. The melody is in Mixolydian mode (major scale with a flattened seventh—a fairly common mode within Irish and Scottish musical traditions), placing a large emphasis on the 1st, 4th, 5th and 7th chords of the scale. John Loesberg speculated: “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. The lyrics were first published in Hughes’ Irish Country Songs, published by Boosey & Hawkes in 1909.
In a letter published in The Irish Times in 1970, Padraic Colum stated that he was the author of all but the final verse. 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. 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 …” and sent it on to Hughes, too late for publication in that particular collection. This extra verse was published in other collections, along with the other three verses. 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.
Scottish tenor Sydney MacEwan recorded the song in 1936 and Irish tenor John McCormack recorded it in 1941. In 1952, folklorist Peter Kennedy recorded the McPeake Family singing a version based on that of Margaret Barry entitled “Our Wedding Day.” It featured a bagpipe accompaniment by Francis McPeake, II. The traditional singer Paddy Tunney learned “She Moved Through the Fair” in County Fermanagh and recorded it in 1965. Other singers who sang it in the 1950s and the 1960s included Patrick Galvin, Dominic Behan and Anne Briggs. It was popular among members of the Traveller community in Ireland at that time. Fairport Convention recorded the song in 1968, adapting the style of the song from the Traveller Margaret Barry, though she herself had learned it from the John McCormack vinyl recording. Former Fairport Convention guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson regularly includes the song in concert performances.
Also of note are the recordings of the song by Alan Stivell in 1973. Art Garfunkel (formerly of Simon & Garfunkel) recorded a particularly lush version on his album Watermark (1977), which featured Irish traditional band The Chieftains and was arranged by Paddy Moloney and Jimmy Webb. Versions of the song recorded by Sinéad O’Connor (as used on the soundtrack of the film Michael Collins), Trees and Nana Mouskouri change the gender of the pronouns, so the song became “He Moved Through the Fair”. O’Connor’s and Trees’ versions keep the original title even so, but Mouskouri changes it. In a 2015 interview, O’Connor expressed regret for having changed the gender. An alternative version of the lyrics is also used in Mary Black’s version of the song. In June 2016, the BBC TV series The Living and the Dead premiered a version of the song sung by Elizabeth Fraser in collaboration with The Insects.
