The Hiring Fair
© 2007 by Paul Espinoza,
Forest Moon Music, BMI, all rights reserved

Come all you young lads and young lassies, who hanker to work on a farm,
Be careful when choosing a master, it might serve for to keep you from harm.

When I was a strapping young fellow, about at the age seventeen,
I hired myself to a farmer at the horse fair in Ballynascreen.

His farm it was up in the mountains, all covered with heather and bog,
And my job, well, it was to look after, his donkey, his goat and his dog.

Me and the farmer and his mother, we lived in a tumble down shack,
His mother was well over ninety, with the bones sticken' out from her back.

It was just an old tumble down ruin, covered with old yellow clay,
And the roof, it was beyond reparin', for the goat had the thatch ate away.

His mother would sit by the fire, for the roof it leaked rain on her head,
And when I would awake in the morning, she'd be sitting there nodding her head.

We had three hens and a rooster, one day they all died in the coop,
So we plucked them and boiled them and salted them and lived for a month on the soup.

Well, bad luck it never comes single, the next day the old nanny-goat died,
So we skinned her & boiled her and salted her and the farmer made shoes from the hide.

Well that's when poor Natty, the donkey, broke his hind leg and suffered great pain,
So the farmer, he shot him and boiled him and called for the salt once again.

I thought that the farmer was crazy and myself, I was going insane,
When poor Fido, he died of distemper, he called for the salt once again.

With what had happened, poor Fido I couldn't sleep thinking that night,
And when I awoke in the morning I got a most terrible fright,

His mother lay dead by the fire, when I ran for the door he cried, "Halt,
Where are you going so early, come back here and help me to salt."

I went out of the door like a rocket, determined it wasn't my fault,
When I stumbled in the yard from confusion, out he come running with salt.

I took to me heals like a cowboy and over the hills like a hare,
And I didn't stop running for a fortnight, and I've never gone back to a fair.

Copyright © 1998 - 2007 by Golden Bough, Inc.