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The Flighty Tailor

[trad.]

Danny Spooner sang The Flighty Tailor on his 1987 album When a Man’s in Love. This track was also included in 2007 on his anthology Years of Spooner. He noted:

Translated from the Irish, this song evokes a multitude of responses to betrayal. Pride is certainly hurt, but the loss of his love, his reason for living, also diminishes the blacksmith’s skills. It should be remembered that a wife would have been expected to work the blacksmith’s bellows for him (and this also had sexual connotations in folksongs).

Lyrics

Danny Spooner sings The Flighty Tailor

Chorus (after each verse):
Ding dong de dilly um, blower and nailer, (×3)
My wife’s gone away with a tailor.

I can’t mend a slan and I can’t mend a spade,
I feel my heart has been betrayed,
For the lovely girl I thought was mine
Has gone with a fop without land or kine.

Oh, where’s the girl that I love so well?
Where my strength and where my skill?
I wear the horn upon my brow
Now she’s gone with the flighty tailor-o.

Oh, wandering girl with the snow-white breast,
Far better come home and take your rest.
With your honest smith forever and aye
Don’t roam with a tailor beneath the sky.