Darragh wrote:A nice song. I suppose that's an awful thing to say but it's true. I like the lyrics. I'm not very good at going "in depth" with music I just knows whats I likes.
I should have said - this song is a broadsheet ballad from the late 19th century. It would have been sold in the streets for a penny or so and taken home to play there. That's why the words, melody and accompaniment are so straightforward. There are only five chords, and two of them are sevenths that could easily have been played as majors.
The Frau and I first heard it on a CD by John Kirkpatrick, the virtuoso concertina player. His approach is to go slower than we do and play it as more of a waltz (although our arrangement is still in triple time)
The strummed instrument is an autoharp (played with a thimble). The solo between verses two and three is played on plucked autoharp.
