Thom Moore lyrics and inspirations Cavan Girl

Cavan Girl

As I walk the road from Killeshandra,

weary, I sit down,

for it's twelve long miles around the lake

to get to Cavan town.

Though Oughter and the road I go

once seemed beyond compare,

now I curse the time it takes to reach

my Cavan girl so fair.

Now autumn shades are on the leaves,

the trees will soon be bare;

each red-gold leaf around me seems

the colour of her hair.

My gaze retreats to find my feet,

and once again I sigh,

for the broken pools of sky remind

the colour of her eyes.

At the Cavan cross each Sunday morning,

there she can be found,

and she seems to have the eye

of every boy in Cavan town.

If my luck will hold, I'll have

the golden summer of her smile,

and, to break the hearts of Cavan men,

she'll talk to me awhile.

So Sunday evening finds me, homeward,

Killeshandra bound,

to work the week, till I return

and court in Cavan town:

when asked if she would be my wife,

at least she'd not said no,

so, next Sunday morning, rouse myself

and back to her I'll go.

As I walk the road from Killeshandra,

weary, I sit down,

for it's twelve long miles around the lake

to get to Cavan town.

Though Oughter and the road I go

once seemed beyond compare,

now I curse the time it takes to reach

my Cavan girl so fair.

Aside from compelling the eminence grise of the first few Cavan Song Contests, the hallowed Jimmy Kennedy from Portrush, author of Harbour Lights and so many other hits of the 30s and 40s, to press the jury to award me both prizes (A and B: a real pop song, and a song about Cavan), this was the first ever song of mine that had an entirely fictional, or at least not personal, background: I never trudged from Killeshandra to anywhere, let alone in search of fond but futile love. It was also, I thought, an ‘original’ melody, until someone pointed out to me, years later, that it was remarkably similar to The Lake of Pontchartrain ... which left me gob-smacked, until I remembered a Joan Baez song from her first or second album, called Flora, the Lily of the West – and the penny dropped. It turns out that there are several hundred versions of the song in the USA, all of them of some antiquity ... and the one performed by Paul B. And Christy M. is not in any sense an Irish song. Whereas the lyrics of this, while only antique in detail (I wrote it in 1978), are rather convincingly Irish in feel and tone. Once again, the Knight palely loiters ... and La Belle Dame Sans Merci bids him dance to her tune. Well, Keats wasn’t Irish, but he is compellingly romantic. There was a version of this recorded by Pat Boone, of all people; and there’s even a French version, translated and recorded by Seychan Renaud, in 2009.