Hello everyone, I'm new to Mudcat. (Please forgive any newbie mistakes I make.) I've actually been using your fabulous resources and hanging around here as an onlooker for more than a year now, but I finally decided it was time to officially join your community.
I grew up in a home filled with traditional music (my father founded an Irish record company when I was young), but for various reasons, I'd lost touch with it for a long while. In the past two years, though, my mind has kept returning to the songs and lyrics I loved (and still love), which is how I found Mudcat in the first place. Lately, I find that entire songs are popping into my head seemingly out of nowhere, when I'd forgotten I knew them in the first place.
The latest song to float back to the surface has been "Pretty Peg." But although I love the song and know it by heart, it's always bothered me that I couldn't make sense of those two words in the second line: "But the WEDDING GLASS (?) followed after her and he kissed her by and by ..." Although many versions of the lyrics give "town clerk," I've watched the video on You Tube many times, and those words just don't seem like the ones Triona is singing. When I came to check the lyrics at Mudcat and found this thread, it was a great relief to know that I wasn't the only one who thought so.
Although the lyrics Deirdre posted in the thread last year are very close to the ones I've always heard, they don't seem to be in the Digitrad database. So I thought I might take the liberty of adding my version to the database.
bivs from New York, NY
PRETTY PEG (2)
When Pretty Peg went down the street some fresh fish for to buy But the wedding class (?) followed after her and he kissed her by and by
*Refrain (after each verse)* With my tiddy right father deedle di-do My tiddy right father deedle dan
"Oh, how can I get to your chamber, lover, how can I get to your bed When your daddy goes to bed at night with the key lyin' under his head?"
"Oh, go and get a ladder, love, with thirty steps and three And put it to the chimney top and come down in a creel to me."
"I went and got a ladder, love, with thirty steps and three With a creel on the top of that and came down in a lump (?) to thee."
No peace nor ease could the old wife get with the dreams runnin' through her head "I'll lay me life," said the gay old wife, "there's a boy in me daughter's bed."
Then up the stairs the old man crept and into the room did steal Silence reigned, for the daughter slept and he never twigged the creel
"My curse attend you, father, what brought you up so soon To put me through my evening prayers, and I just lying down."
He went back to his gay old wife, he went back to she: "She has the prayer book in her hand and she's prayin' for you and me."
No peace nor ease could that old wife get till she would rise and see But she went on a stumblin' block, and into the creel went she
"Oh, hi I rocked her, ho I rocked her, didn't I rock her well For if any old wife begrudge me her daughter, I'd rock her into hell."
Transcribed from YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOrReDJEpNQ Bothy Band televised performance at Dublin Embankment, Sep. 1976