Cockles and Mussels

Dublin’s unofficial anthem is, on the documentary evidence, a Victorian music-hall song: the earliest confirmed publications date to 1883–84, credited to James Yorkston of Edinburgh with arrangement by Edmund Forman, and scholars including Siobhán Kilfeather find no connection between it and the older Irish street-ballad tradition. The tragicomic tale of the fishmonger who dies of a fever and returns as a ghost has antecedents — a related “Cockles and Mussels” featuring “Jim the Mussel Man” was published by J.B. Geoghegan in 1876, and Molly Malones appear in songs back to the 1790s — but the familiar melody and words cannot be traced before the 1880s. The legend that Molly was a real seventeenth-century Dubliner is a twentieth-century invention. The Dubliners’ recordings made it a global standard, and Sinéad O’Connor recorded a notably ghostly version.