"She Moved Through the Fair" (also called "Our Wedding Day", "My Young Love Said to Me", "I Once Had a True Love", "She Moves Through the Fair" or "She Moved Through the Faire") 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.
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. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She_Moved_Through_the_Fair
Vivacious vocal trio Samaïa are in town for the London leg of their European tour. Their debut album is a rich powerhouse of women’s voices reinterpreting folk songs from across the globe, gilted with unique harmonies. On this episode of A World In London they gifted us with treasures from Sweden, Turkey, and Bulgaria, and we learned about their unconventional warm up exercises that include massage and yoga! ‘We sing with our whole body’ explains Luna Silva, going on to describe the athletics of intertwining melodies through three voices. Samaïa weave a rich tapestry of polyphony, mostly accapela, but with minimal touches of percussion, that add to the primal feel of their songs. In fact they met at a Georgian polyphonic workshop, which hints at how extraordinary they are. Luna is the daughter of a Spanish clown and English actress, studied ethnomusicology at SOAS, plus Hindi, ukulele, and jaws harp. Noémie Nael comes from a theatre background. Eléonore Fourniau, studied in Istanbul, plays the saz, and is a queen of Anatolian ornamentation. The three might all have been raised in France but when it comes to music, possibly even The World Is Not Enough to contain their wanderlust! Samaia take their name from a Georgian dance performed by women which originated in the 12th century. Sample a glorious tricolour of harmony, magic, and shakti with the 21st century Samaïa now - three wonderful voices dancing in one superlative body of sound! From: https://artofjazz.blogspot.com/2019/05/samaia-polyphonic-wanderlust.html
