Molly Malone

The story

"Molly Malone", also known as "Cockles and Mussels" or "In Dublin's Fair City", is a song set in Dublin that has become the city's unofficial anthem. It tells the fictional tale of a fishwife who sold her wares in the streets of Dublin and died young, of a fever. Its first known printing is in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1876, in a section of a book titled "Songs from English and German Universities", a placement taken to suggest an Irish origin. In 1884 Francis Brothers and Day of London published it as a work written and composed by James Yorkston of Edinburgh, with music arranged by Edmund Forman; that edition says it was reprinted with permission from Kohler and Son of Edinburgh, which implies an earlier Scottish edition, but no copy of one has been found. An 1882 source credits J. B. Geoghegan with the song. In 1884, too, a variant with different words appeared as "Cockles and Mussels" in Students' Songs, a collection of songs sung at Harvard, Yale, Columbia and other American colleges.

Siobhán Marie Kilfeather placed the song in the music hall style of its period. One cannot wholly dismiss the possibility that it is "based on an older folk song", she wrote, but "neither melody nor words bear any relationship to the Irish tradition of street ballads". Its tragicomic manner was popular at the time, and it was probably influenced by earlier songs on similar themes. A song in Apollo's Medley, a book printed in Doncaster around 1790 and rediscovered in 2010, speaks of a "Sweet Molly Malone" who lives in Howth, near Dublin, but has nothing else in common with it; it was reprinted in The Shamrock: A Collection of Irish Songs and in The Edinburgh Literary Journal in 1831. "Widow Malone" (published by 1809) calls its heroine Molly Malone, and "Meet Me Miss Molly Malone" was printed in Glasgow by 1836 and in America by 1840. "Pat Corney's Account of Himself" (by 1826) opens on a city of pretty girls and closes on a cry of oysters, cockles and mussels for sale. "Dublin's fair city" was a common phrase in the 19th century, and "alive, alive O" was a cry of street vendors selling oysters, mussels, fish and eels. A "Cockles and Mussels" credited to J. B. Geoghegan, published in 1876, has a very similar chorus but is set in London, with Jim the mussel man and no Molly.

In the late 20th century a legend grew up that Molly was a real woman of the 17th century, told in two opposite ways: in one a street hawker of doubtful reputation, in the other one of the few chaste hawkers of her day. There is no evidence that the song is based on any real woman. "Molly" began as a familiar form of Mary and Margaret, and many Molly Malones were born in Dublin over the centuries, none of them connected with the song. Kilfeather called the story of a historical Molly "nonsense". Even so, the Dublin Millennium Commission in 1988 endorsed claims made for a Mary Malone who died on 13 June 1699, and proclaimed 13 June "Molly Malone Day".

For the Millennium of 1988 the Jurys Hotel Group commissioned a statue of Molly with her cart from the Dublin artist Jeanne Rynhart, unveiled at the foot of Grafton Street by the Lord Mayor, Ben Briscoe. Adrian Munnelly, director of the Arts Council, wrote that it was "entirely deficient in artistic point and merit"; Briscoe answered that it "was regarded with great warmth and affection by the city of Dublin". It shows Molly as a young woman in a low-cut dress of the 17th century. In 2014 the statue was moved to make way for the Luas tram tracks, repaired by Bushy Park Ironworks, and set up in July outside the Dublin Tourist Office on Suffolk Street, formerly St. Andrew's Church, where some walking tours of the city start and end. A custom of tourists rubbing its bust "for luck" was criticised as objectifying women, among others by the Dublin-born singer Imelda May; a busker began a "Leave Molly mAlone" campaign in 2024, and in 2025 Dublin City Council tried stewards and then decided to place flowerbeds around the base.

The song has been recorded by The Dubliners, Heino, Danny Kaye, Pete Seeger, U2 and Sinéad O'Connor, among others. A charity single made for the Dublin Millennium in 1988 reached number 4 in the Irish singles chart. The Irish soap opera Fair City takes its title from the song's opening line.

What it says

A street ballad in small: a pretty young fishmonger wheels her barrow through Dublin, crying her cockles and mussels as her parents did before her, until a fever carries her off, and her ghost goes on wheeling the barrow and crying her wares. The death is told lightly, in the bright, tuneful, tragicomic manner of the music halls, and the street cry "alive, alive O" makes the chorus.

The words