Here’s the other song mentioned in this thread. You can hear it at Spotify and at Broadjam.com, where I also found these lyrics:


FAIR EXCHANGE
As recorded by Ben Sands on “Better Already,” 2003.

They say that Dan the farmer had been married late in life:
Forty-seven summers gone before he took a wife,
A woman from the town who thought she’d like the country life
Although she was some twenty years his junior.
Well, after six warm months or so, the temperature declined.
Their words got few and far between and passion fell behind.
They lived together quietly like two odd socks on the line,
And they only pulled together at the milkin’.

Seventeen months later and no babby in the cot,
The farmer looked around himself to see what he had got:
A stony wife and stony ground; that seemed to be his lot.
He thought he couldn’t face another winter.
The wife was disenchanted with the quiet of the farm,
For she’d been used to company and someone on her arm,
But the only one she ever saw was Tim, the tinker man
When he passed that way with caravan and pony.

The farmer’s mood got blacker as he viewed his stony ground.
One day he took his bicycle and likewise fifty pound.
He nodded to his missus; he was headin’ for the town,
And she watched him disappearin’ up the loanin’.
He hadn’t traveled far until he spied a tinker man
Who was pokin’ at a fire for to boil a billy can.
They struck up conversation, tinker Tim and farmer Dan
Where the rocky road it winds around the mountain.

The tinker spoke of hardships in his movable abode.
And how modern times were most unkind for travelers on the road,
While the farmer moaned and mumbled with his own sad episode.
They swapped their troubles well into the evenin’.
Well, to make the story shorter, they agreed upon a plan,
That the farmer take the pony and the tinker’s caravan
While the tinker’d try his fortune with the farmer’s wife and land,
And make what sense they could out of the bargain.

A wondrous idea it seems, and maybe no surprise:
The farmer’s wife was overjoyed with all that did arise,
For she had just been thinkin’ of the need to advertise
When heaven smiled upon her situation.
As far as I can gather now, the deal was for a year,
But it’s more than seven summers since the farmer disappeared.
While the man who’d been a tinker loves the farmin’ atmosphere
And his five wee children help him at the milkin’.

And so I end my story, though a strange one it may be:
How peoples’ lives are altered with some ingenuity.
As to where the farmer went to, that remains a mystery,
But his missus and the tinker’s not surmisin’.
Some say he went to Dublin where he met a millionaire
Who, bein’ a far-out relative, made sure he got his share.
Some say he might be buried with a caravan and mare
Where the rocky road it winds around the mountain.