Salut! Live

At one online equivalent of sheet music, the composers of The Curragh of Kildare are given as "Moore" and "Burns".

Born 188 years apart, Christy Moore and Robert Burns were not able to sit down over steaming bowls of Irish stew or Scotch broth to write it together.

The song as attributed to the Bard of Ayrshire takes as its title the first line, The Winter It Is Past, and makes no mention of the sprawling plain, old army barracks or horse breeding grounds of the Curragh.

The most convincing explanation I can find is that like so many songs collected in different forms around the British Isles, The Curragh of Kildare acquired geography and meaning over the course of time.

Christy Moore says he came across the song in the works of Patrick Weston Joyce, an Irish historian, writer and music collector (1827-1914). By then, a reference to the Curragh had appeared and, re-arranging the song with Donal Lunny, Moore turned this reference into the chorus we know today.

"The original was written by Scotland's poet laureate Robbie Burns," Moore has written. "It tells the story of a young Scottish woman whose lover is away soldiering for the Queen in the Curragh of Kildare. She decides to present herself for recruitment disguised as a young fellow. We never get to hear the outcome. Certainly a good case for a sequel."

Well, Moore hails from Newbridge, on the edge of the Curragh, so his words carry weight. But any sequel might not be as he intended. Some authorities rule out Burns as the author. The suggestion of the subject being about an executed highwayman names the miscreant as Johnson and I have seen a claim that Burns removed lines mentioning him.

If you have the stamina for more, there is a long thread at the Mudcat message board, though even this probably won't settle the argument for you.

Instead, readers could tell me which version/s especially appeal to them if, indeed, they share my affection for the song in the first place.

The clips I have selected would not be everyone's choice.

Eddi Reader is a superb interpreter of the work of Burns and has recorded The Winter It Is Past, Curragh-less, on her album The Songs of Robert Burns (Deluxe Edition).

I offer instead a video showing her seated with a second guitarist in an empty pub (sadly an example of tautology these days).

This is not Reader at her towering best - see this wonderful review by Pete Sixsmith of her live in Durham a few years ago - and I have minor quarrels with the accompaniment [finding her strumming a little too fast], but I love the lusty singing and hope the pub will one day soon be serving customers again.

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And I turn finally, and perhaps inevitably, to Christy Moore, not his studio version, but live in Carlow, 30 miles south of his birthplace, with Declan Sinnott.

And there you have them, two versions of a lovely song that strike me as good but not outstanding.