Cockles And Mussels: A Song History
"Cockles and Mussels," also known as "Molly Malone" and "In Dublin's Fair City," tells of Molly Malone, a Dublin street seller of shellfish who dies of a fever and whose ghost goes on pushing her barrow.[1] It is listed as number 16932 in the Roud Folk Song Index.[1] The oldest printing found in the sources consulted here is in Carmina Collegensia, a college songbook edited by Henry Randall Waite and published by Oliver Ditson of Boston with an 1876 copyright, which gives the song with music and no author's name in its section of English and German student songs.[2] William H. Hills's Students' Songs, published in Cambridge, Massachusetts, also carried it by 1884.[3] Accounts of the earliest printing differ: the genealogist Sean Murphy named an 1884 London edition as the earliest he had traced in a 1993 article, while another account of his, quoted on Folkinfo, puts a Cambridge, Massachusetts, printing of 1883 first.[4][5]
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Newhaven Fishwives, Jeanie Wilson and Annie Linton, salted paper print from calotype negative, 1845. Scottish fishwives rather than a Dublin street seller, shown for their trade.
Sheet music published by Francis Brothers and Day, catalogued by the Charlie Chaplin Archive under the date 1884, credits James Yorkston as writer and composer and Edmund Forman as arranger.[6] Murphy reports that the 1884 edition called the piece a "comic song" and said it was reprinted by permission of Kohler and Son of Edinburgh; he took this to mean that an earlier Scottish edition existed, though his enquiries at the National Library of Scotland turned up no copy.[4] Citing Baptie's Musical Scotland of 1894, Murphy describes Yorkston as a composer and editor of Kohler's Musical Star, and he notes that the Scottish Students' Songbook printed the song under Yorkston's name from 1891 on.[4] In Murphy's view the song is Yorkston's composition rather than a traditional one, and it travelled so widely, from music halls to student singsongs, that its writer was forgotten and it passed for an anonymous folk song.[4] He adds that no version older than 1850 has come to light, and that James B. Geoghegan's "Cockles and Mussels" of 1876 is a different song with another tune and a different hero.[4] The Traditional Ballad Index, however, lists the author as unknown and observes that the Yorkston attribution comes after the 1876 Boston printing, which names no author, so in the sources consulted here the question of who wrote the song remains open.[1][2]
A legend that Molly was a real woman of the seventeenth century took hold during Dublin's 1988 Millennium celebrations, when a press conference announced the discovery of baptism and burial entries for a Mary Malone; Murphy countered that no evidence connected those entries to the song's Molly and that Dublin's registers contain many women of that name.[4] The same celebrations produced Jeanne Rynhart's statue of Molly, unveiled at the foot of Grafton Street; tram construction for the Luas in 2014 led to its move to Suffolk Street.[7] Murphy, who thinks Molly more likely a type than a real person, notes that the song's Dublin setting eventually made it a kind of unofficial anthem for the city.[4] Judy House includes it in Jam Across America, a 178-page jam book for mountain dulcimer clubs, drawn from the playlists of clubs around the country and arranged in DAD tuning.[8]
Sources
- Traditional Ballad Index: "Molly Malone".
- Internet Archive: "Henry Randall Waite, ed., Carmina Collegensia (Boston: Oliver Ditson & Co., 1876)".
- Internet Archive: "William H. Hills, Students' Songs (Cambridge, Mass.: Moses King, 1884)".
- History Ireland: "Who was Molly Malone?" by Sean Murphy (Summer 1993).
- Folkinfo (Mainly Norfolk): "Cockles and Mussels".
- Charlie Chaplin Archive: "Cockles and Mussels or, Molly Malone / Written and Composed by James Yorkston; Arranged by Edmund Forman".
- The Irish Times: "Statue of imitation: Replica of Dublin's Molly Malone unveiled in Boston".
- Judy House: "Jam Across America".
- Image: David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Newhaven Fishwives, Jeanie Wilson and Annie Linton, salted paper print from calotype negative, 1845. The Cleveland Museum of Art.