I woke this morning and discovered Pearl Fish’s cover of Joshua Burnside’s song Marching Round the Ladies on instagram. Pearl and I had met at the The Palm Tree, and then at an after party at my place late last year. She’s a folk singer in London. So apt that this song, inspired by a Belfast street song stuck out to her.
I was struck by the pattern in each verse, the repeat of the first line, and common fourth “As you have done before” as in:
Marching round the ladies, Marching round the shore, Marching round the ladies, As you have done before.
Joshua explains these verses come from an earlier song called Round About the Ladies, where the theme of these two verses lift from. He changes the melody, and instead of repeating the first line three times, adds a counterpoint line.
In and out of windows,
I love this starting line in the next verse. In the original notes about the song, in the book Belfast City of Song, author Maurice Leyden writes that the song is a ring song, where players take hands in a circle and a single player marches round the outside. In this verse arms are raised and the player weaves in between the players. Joshua makes his version more ambiguous with the second line “In and out the door”
Stand and face your lover, Stand and face the shore, Stand and face your lover, As you have done before.
In the third verse, where Stand and face your lover the player stands in front of their chosen lover. However when I listened to this, I loved the shift from a game, to a song that Joshua makes. The original’s final verse “Chase him (her) back to Belfast” is changed to Paris, and in his version he deviates from the As you have done, with verses like:
Bring me wine and porter, Send me off to bed, Bring me wine and porter, For the noise inside my head.
Joshua’s version feels more abstract, and obscure and almost about someone having a difficult life. And in that the refrain, “As you have done before”, feels more like an echo, than a chorus sung, hands joined, skipping around—literally “round the ladies.” In Joshua’s version, the circle expands. The imagery moves from Belfast to Paris, from physical movement to emotional terrain. The refrain becomes less a directive and more a kind of echo in the mind—something we carry with us as we have done before and yet never quite the same.
That’s the beauty of folk music: it’s at once old and new, anchored and drifting. Marching Round The Ladies feels like a conversation across time, and invites you to step in, take hands, and maybe find something unexpected in the circle.