The Low-Backed Car

Samuel Lover’s comic song in praise of sweet Peggy selling her wares from a donkey cart, popularized through his one-man “Irish Evenings” entertainments of the 1840s and published as sheet music by 1848, with broadsides circulating before 1853. Lover wrote the words to an existing melody, identified in period sources simply as an old Irish air. The song had remarkable staying power in popular culture — it’s referenced in Gone with the Wind — and remained a standard of Irish tenors well into the twentieth century.