A Maid Gone to Comber: A Song History

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"A Maid Gone to Comber" appears to be the song indexed as "The Next Market Day," Roud 6547, which Mainly Norfolk lists under the titles "A Maid Went to Comber" and "A Maid Going to Comber"; the exact wording "Gone to Comber" does not occur in the sources consulted here.[1] In the Ballad Index's summary, a girl sent to sell her mother's yarn at Comber market spends time with a young man who seems to be a musician, and he pays for the yarn so that he can play her a new tune; she heads home resolved to find him again.[2] Comber, in County Down, grew up at the north-west tip of Strangford Lough, and by the late eighteenth century the Andrews family had set up a linen bleach green and corn and flour mills there, adding a flax-spinning mill in 1864.[3]

Charcoal drawing of a woman in a bonnet and apron seated at a spinning wheel, spinning flax from a distaff

François Bonvin, A Woman Spinning Flax, charcoal on laid paper, 1861. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A French drawing, shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

Herbert Hughes included "The next market day (Ulster)" in the first volume of his Irish Country Songs.[4] Boosey & Co. published that volume around 1909.[5] According to the Dictionary of Ulster Biography, the Belfast-born Hughes gathered and arranged the tune, while Padraic Colum was responsible for collecting and reworking the words.[6] The song also reached Scotland: the Ballad Index cites a text titled "The Neist Market Day" in the Greig-Duncan collection and takes its earliest date for the song, 1914, from that collection.[2] The Index also lists an undated Columbia record of the song by Seamus O'Doherty.[2]

The McPeake Family sang it as "A Maid Going to Comber" on The McPeake Family of Belfast, a Riverside album of 1961, and Samuel B. Charters's notes put it in "the purest Irish tradition."[1] The groups Oisín and Cran later recorded it as well.[7] Damien O'Kane recorded it in 2015 as "'Til Next Market Day."[1]

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Sources

  1. Mainly Norfolk: "The Next Market Day / A Maid Went to Comber".
  2. The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Next Market Day".
  3. Comber Historical Society: "Introducing Comber" (home page).
  4. College of the Holy Cross Libraries: "Irish country songs" (Herbert Hughes), table of contents.
  5. National Library of Ireland: "Irish country songs" (first volume, c1909).
  6. Dictionary of Ulster Biography: "Herbert Hughes".
  7. irishtune.info: "Next Market Day".