This is a traditional Irish sean-nós song from Connemara covered by several different artists. It the video is a cover by Liam Ó Maonlaí.  Also known as ‘Sí Do Mhaimeó Í, this brisk and energetic comic song tells the story of an old woman who will marry a young man – the cautionary element being that if they do marry he will drink all her money.

Joe Heaney Archives

Joe explains that the ‘hag with the money’ was his great-grandmother, his mother’s grandmother, a woman named Máire Ní Cháthasaigh (Mary Casey) from Mynish, an island near Carna.  He says he learned it from his father, and that the song was known by everybody in the village. Indeed, this is still the case – and by a great many more besides, thanks largely to the popularity of Joe’s recordings of it.

This is a wonderful recording, because despite the lack of a large audience Joe gets up a good head of steam (no pun intended) and sings with great energy and conviction. At the same time, the domestic setting – cups of tea with Lucy in Joe’s kitchen – approximates the sort of environment that would have been natural for these songs when Joe was growing up.

Among other recordings of this song, those recorded by the late Dara Bán Mac Donnchadha are of particular interest, as Dara Bán was a son of Seán Choilm Mac Donnchadha, whose house still stands next door to Joe’s family home in Áird Thoir, and from whom Joe learned a number of songs when he was growing up. Dara Bán sings a total of six stanzas, seven counting the refrain; three of these have nothing whatever to do with the proposed marriage, but deal rather with fishing and the treatment of fishing-nets. See Rogha Amhrán (Cló Iar-Chonnachta 1999). Interestingly, none of the commercially-recorded performances I’ve heard, including Joe’s, involve lilting as Joe’s does here.