Spanish Lady- Dominic Behan (Dub) 1959 REC
[From Behan's Topic LP "Down by the Liffeyside" recording, 1959. Liner notes and an excerpt from an online bio follow. This is one standard treatment of a tune and theme common throughout the British tradition.
Similar texts recorded by several artists see for example The Halliard (Nic Jones, Dave Moran, Nigel Patterson) who sang The Spanish Lady in 1967 on their first album, It's the Irish in Me and also Al O'Donnell, who sang Spanish Lady in 1967 on a single on the Tribune label. It was also included in the following year on the Tribune anthology Ballads for Drinking and the Crack.
Jimmy Hutchison attributes his version to Behan.
R. Mattesopn 2017]
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.
The younger brother of poet and playwright Brendan Behan, Dominic Behan (aka Doiminic Ó Beacháin) was a writer, social and political activist, and singer, who was well known in England and even managed a challenge to Bob Dylan over aspects of his writing at one point. Behan was born in Dublin, to a family of remarkable achievements. His father was Stephen Behan, a lapsed student for the priesthood who became a soldier in the Irish Republican Army, and served in the War of Independence -- and, indeed, was one of the Squad (aka the "Twelve Apostles") organized by Michael Collins in 1919, which claimed the lives of several British officers by assassination; his mother was Kathleen Behan, a scholar and a collector of traditional songs and stories; additionally, Behan's uncle on his mother's side, Peadar Kearney, was the author of "A Soldier's Song," which became the basis for the Irish national anthem. Dominic combined his father's orientation as a man of action in his politics with his mother's literary and musical interests.
He joined the IRA's youth division, and by the early '50s had been arrested for leading protests against government economic policies that he felt were unfair to working families. He also published his first poems and articles through the IRA. Behan and his wife, the former Josephine Quinn, became active in the Communist Party in the 1950s, and embraced numerous leftist causes, and later emigrated to England, where he worked for the BBC, writing radio scripts. He also authored the play Posterity Be Damned, which was produced in Dublin in 1959 and dealt with republican activity after the Civil War. And he gained enormous critical respect for his autobiographical novel Teems of Times (1961), which was dramatized on television in 1977.
THE SPANISH LADY —as sung by Dominic Behan of Dublin on his 1959 on his Topic LP "Down by the Liffeyside."
As I went down through Dublin City
At the hour of twelve at night,
Who should I see but a Spanish lady
Washing her feet by candle light?
First she washed them, and then she dried them,
Over a fire of angry coals,
In all me life I ne'er did see
Such a maid so neat about the soles.
Chorus: Whack fol the too-ra loo-ra laddy,
Whack fol the too-ra loo-ra-lay.
I stopped to look but the watchman passed.
And said he, “Young fellow, now the night is late.
Along with you home or I will wrestle you
Straightway through the Bridewell gate.”
I threw a kiss to the Spanish lady,
Hot as a fire of angry coals,
In all my life I ne'er did see
Such a maid so neat about the soles.
Now she's no mott for a Poddle swaddy
With her ivory comb and her mantle fine
But she'd make a wife for the Provost Marshall
Drunk on brandy and claret wine
I got a look from the Spanish lady,
Cold as a fire of ashy coals,
In all my life I ne'er did see
Such a maid so neat about the soles.
I've wandered North and I've wandered South
by Stonybatter and Patrick's Close,
Up and down the Gloucester Diamond
And back through Napper Tandy's house.
[Slow] Old age has laid her arm on me
Cold as a fire of ashy coal
But where is the lovely Spanish lady
Neat and sweet about the soles?
[Back to tempo] Chorus: Whack fol the too-ra loo-ra laddy,
Whack fol the too-ra loo-ra-lay. [repeat Chorus]