The Fair-Haired Lass

Among traditional players this A Mixolydian reel is as often called "Jig Away the Donkey" or "Mick Hoy's" — after the Fermanagh fiddler — as "The Fair-Haired Lass," and it is regularly mixed up with a separate reel, "The Piper on Horseback." The Traditional Tune Archive puts that confusion down to a mistake on a record label, the kind that happens when two tunes are paired in a medley. Frankie Kennedy and Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh played it in a set on a tour of America in the mid-1970s; it later turned up on Cathal Hayden's "Handed Down" and on the "Hidden Fermanagh" collection.