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The Spanish Lady / Dublin City

[ Roud 542 , 3086 ; G/D 4:746 ; Henry H532, H641 ; Ballad Index E098 ; DT DUBLNCTY , DUBLNCI2 ; Mudcat 44796 ; trad.]

Katherine Campbell: Songs From North-East Scotland Gale Huntington, Lani Herrmann, John Moulden: Sam Henry’s Songs of the People Colm O Lochlainn: More Irish Street Ballads

Mary Cruickshank’s version of The Spanish Lady was printed by Gavin Greig in the Buchan Observer on 10 May 1910, and is one of nine versions of this song in volume 4 of The Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection. Katherine Campbell included it in 2009 in her book Songs From North-East Scotland.

Séamus Ennis sang a fragment of Dublin City to Alan Lomax in Dublin in 1951. This recording was included on the anthology Songs of Seduction. (The Folk Songs of Britain Volume 2; Caedmon 1961; Topic 1968) and in 2000 on the album’s Rounder CD reissue. Alan Lomax and/or Peter Kennedy commented in the album’s booklet:

Burl Ives used to sing another version of this song, which begins:

A I walked out in Dublin city
About the hour of twelve at night,
I spied a fair young maiden
Washing her feet by candlelight,

In the refrain, she appears to be counting, but in reverse series, running from twenty to nothing and from nineteen to one. If one combines this refrain with the second stanza of the present version, perhaps the song may make sense as a picture of a market girl or a prostitute summing up her day’s receipt of coins. On the other hand, perhaps, the first stanza here is another of the many instances in Irish folk song of an encounter with a feminine symbol of the spirit of depressed Ireland—in this case a revolutionary one. Now it appears that Séamus Ennis has collected a version with an number of stanzas linking the song with No, John, No or Keys of Heaven (see text). My guess is that these stanzas are an addict and an afterthought, but what the song really concerns, no one can be sure. Perhaps Robert Graves could offer on of his reasonable, supernatural explanations.

References:
Also called The Spanish Lady—Irish equivalent of the English song No, John, No (see Vol. I, Side A: Track 9); Keys of Heaven (See Reeves: Idiom of the People); the American versions Paper of Pins and Uh-Uh No

The recordings of Séamus Ennis and of Robin Roberts singing Dublin City were included in 2021 on the Irish Traditional Music Archive DVDs of field Recordings made by Alan Lomax in Ireland in 1951, The New Demesne.

Dominic Behan sang The Spanish Lady in 1959 on his Topic LP Down by the Liffeyside. The liner notes of the 1963 reissue commented:

Dominic writes [in the original album notes]: “Hamish Henderson tells me this was written by Joseph Campbell of Ulster. Fancy that now!”

In her traditional dress, the Spanish lady is sometimes encountered washing her feet, sometimes combing her hair, sometimes counting her cash (Alan Lomax thinks she might be a prostitute counting up her evening takings)—but always by the light of a candle and always in Dublin City. Yet who she is and how she got there we do not know; all we know is that she was very beautiful, and very exotic, and also inaccessible.

This is a treatment of a tune and theme common throughout the British tradition.

The Halliard (Nic Jones, Dave Moran, Nigel Patterson) sang The Spanish Lady in 1967 on their first album, It’s the Irish in Me.

Al O’Donnell sang Spanish Lady in 1967 on a single on the Tribune label. This track was also included in the following year on the Tribune anthology Ballads for Drinking and the Crack. This video was recorded in New York City in 2009:

Paddie Bell sang The Spanish Lady in 1968 on her LP I Know Where I’m Going.

The Johnstons sang The Spanish Lady in 1969 on their Transatlantic album Bitter Green. They noted:

Lost love and lost youth. I suppose in everybody’s life there’s a Spanish lady. Add a rollicking chorus and you get this captivating Dublin street song.

Christy Moore sang Spanish Lady on his 1969 album Paddy on the Road. He noted:

On a lighter side, the tuneful Spanish Lady tells of the admiration from afar of a beautiful woman by a young man and cotrasts strongly with Marrow Bones, a West of Ireland variant of The Blind Man He Could See, another chapter in the battle of the sexes—ending in a male victory!

The Ripley Wayfarers sang Spanish Lady in 1971 on their Traditional Sound album Chips and Brown Sauce.

Frank Harte sang The Spanish Lady in 1973 on his Topic LP Through Dublin City. He also sang it in a 2004 concert on the subject of ‘songs of love and courtship’. This recording was included in 2016 on his posthumous album When Adam Was in Paradise. He noted on the first album:

For too long this fine old Dublin song has been sung mainly by choral groups and concert sopranos. I remember the song from childhood and it has grown as I heard verses of it year after year. In some versions the last verse ends—

She had 20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 none
She had 19 17 15 13 11 9 7 5 3 and 1,

meaning “she had the odds and the evens of it”—in other words she had everything.

[George Townshend sang this numerical chorus in his song Twenty, Eighteen, … which is a short two-verse version of Madam, I Have Come to Court You.]

Mad Jocks & Englishmen sang Spanish Lady on the Brum Folk 76 Souvenir Album.