She Moved Through the Fair (Arranged for Guitar by Joseph Chester)

As I listened to the luminous Anne Briggs' Edinburgh Folk Festival recording of this song (surely the definitive version - find it here) it struck me how strange, deep and gothic it is, as it moves without explanation from the meeting of lovers at a fair to the woman as a ghostly apparition, promising that they will be married in the afterlife. There may be a verse missing and indeed there was a tussle in the letters page of the Irish Times in the 1970s with someone claiming they had written it. As proof, they produced a missing verse which to my mind goes a long way to establishing that they could not have been the author!

You could say that my arrangement takes the form of theme and variations as the beauty of the melody and particularly Anne Briggs' voice sent me into a sort of compositional reverie. So a sort of re-contextualisation of an ancient melody.

Score for solo guitar (DADGAD) in standard notation, not TAB. You will receive a PDF.