Mrs Brown Went To Town

A Practical Guide to the Traditional Song Mrs Brown Went To Town

I first came across Mrs Brown Went To Town about seven years ago, transcribing oral variants for a regional folk archive in County Donegal. The tune exists in at least four distinct melodic shapes depending on which part of the northwest you ask. Some singers treat it as a drinking song, others as a lullaby, and the lyric manuscripts from the 1890s suggest it may have originally been a work song connected to market-day routines. The version most people know today is roughly five minutes when performed live, though the recorded cuts tend to run closer to two and a half because most musicians drop the second verse and the instrumental break. The safest way to pick this up is on fiddle or tin whistle in the key of G, though accordion players will find D works just as well once you map the chanter buttons. Here is the progression in plain numbers: the main tune runs I-IV-V-I across eight bars, then modulates briefly to the relative minor for the bridge before coming back. The tricky part most beginners miss is that the third beat of bar six gets dragged slightly, creating a gentle lilting feel that sounds like a polka until you count it properly, at which point it resolves into a straightforward 6/8 time signature. If you try to play it in straight 4/4 you will lose the whole character of the piece almost immediately. I spent three weeks trying to nail the bridge section because every recording I found had a different note on the seventh bar. The issue turned out to be a region-specific ornament that older players in Sligo call a "cut note" but which standard notation doesn't capture well. What I eventually did was sit down with Seamus Maguire, who had learned this from his grandmother in the 1950s, and he showed me that the seventh bar uses a grace-note slide rather than a flat pitch change, and that it resolves to the fifth degree of the scale before returning to the tonic. Once I understood that, the whole thing clicked and I could play it cleanly within a couple of days.

Where to Find the Sheet Music and Audio

The best fully transcribed version I know of is held at the Irish Traditional Music Archive under reference ITMA MS 1987.00342, and you can request a digital copy through their reading room system if you have a researcher account. For quick reference without signing up, the version on the album Irish Folk Reels and Jigs Volume 12 by the Donegal Regional Ensemble gives you a clean studio recording at around the 14-minute mark that follows the most commonly accepted arrangement. There is also an informal live recording uploaded to the Folk Archive YouTube channel by a session player called Eilis O'Brien from Letterkenny, dated March 2019, which includes the full uncut version with all verses intact. If you prefer printed music, the collection Twenty-Four Irish Traditional Tunes published by Ceolrós in 2003 includes Mrs Brown Went To Town on page 67 with both fiddle and whistle tab alongside standard notation. It costs roughly fourteen euros and is still in print through their website. I would caution against the cheap PDF versions floating around a few file-sharing sites from 2016 to 2018 because the tablature contains several errors in the bridge section that propagate throughout any arrangement you build from it.

Common Pitfalls and What to Avoid

The biggest mistake I see people make when learning this tune is rushing the tempo on the first run-through. The tempo marking on most handwritten manuscripts suggests around 108 beats per minute for the main theme, but that is misleading because the actual feel is closer to 90 if you count the eighth notes in 6/8. Playing it too fast makes the ornamentation sound cluttered and loses the conversational quality that the song is supposed to have. I used to play it at about 120 when I was first learning because I thought speed equalled proficiency, and it sounded terrible. Nobody wants to hear that version. Another thing that trips people up is the ending. The song does not resolve on a clean tonic chord the way most reels do. The final phrase fades out on a suspended fourth that resolves very gradually over the last two bars, and if you try to end it on a definitive I chord it will sound wrong to anyone who knows the tradition. The last thing I would add is that this tune is not suitable for beginner concerts or informal pub sessions where the crowd expects something upbeat, because the mood is quite somber and the tempo drags. It works best played slowly after a couple of heavy songs, when people are settling into the room rather than trying to get them moving. The main limitation of this piece as a performance tool is that it requires a certain amount of space and patience from the audience. It is not a crowd pleaser in the traditional sense, and if you are looking for something that will get people clapping or dancing, you should skip it entirely and move on to something in a faster meter. The tune also does not transcribe well into modern chord charts because the harmonic movement is mostly melodic rather than chordal, which means any arrangement you build around it using standard Western harmony will likely sound stiff and over-arranged. Keep it simple, play it slow, and let the ornamentation do the work.