Rambling Pitchfork

The name marks an itinerant farm labourer — a "rambling pitchfork" was a hired hand who drifted from farm to farm, in the same sense "hired gun" came to mean a mercenary. The tune reached print in R.M. Levey's First Collection of Dance Music of Ireland (London, 1858), though George Petrie had published a version of the melody a few years earlier as "Pipe on the Hob" in his Ancient Music of Ireland (1855), and it appears in the County Cork manuscripts of piper and cleric James Goodman. O'Neill later printed it as "The Fisherman's Widow." Pipers took it up early: Tom Ennis, with fiddler James Morrison, recorded it for Columbia in 1922 under the name "Wedding Trip."