She Moves Though The Fair: Marianne Faithfull « The Knife and Fork Factory

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Marianne Faithfull "She Moved Through the Fair" (1966, 1990).

Faithfull's two versions appear on the albums North Country Maid and Blazing Away. The first is a pretty girl-singer version with more than a hint of Davy Graham's Indian influence in the musical backing; the second is an a capella live version from a woman whose voice has changed beyond all recognition. It's hard to credit that it is the same person, but both versions are lovely – although I think that the deeper-voiced, unaccompanied version is the more affecting of the two.

In both versions, Faithfull sings variations on Colum's lyrics (verses 1, 2 and 4), keeping the original poem's brothers, but it is the father (not the parents) who won't slight you. In verse two, it is the young love's progress that is described, not the watcher's reaction thereto: "And I watched her so swiftly move here and move there". In the last verse , she dreams that her dead love came in, which is a fairly standard variation, albeit one more associated with earlier recordings such as McCormack's than with the rock-influenced 1960s. Her use of Moved in the title rather than Moves is also indicative of this (it seems that Anne Briggs changed that d to an s, from the evidence I have).

Some light is shed by Faithfull's liner notes in Blazing Away. First, she credits Padraic Colum as the author. Then she tells us,

I've loved it since I was 16, sung it all through these years with their twists and turns of fate.

She was 16 at the end of 1962. I suspect that Faithfull's source, whatever it was, would have drawn upon the song as sung by John McCormack.