The Price of her Heart Brian Hooper, April/May 2007
I knew she lived somewhere down Waterside way,
We rode the same bus into town every day.
When something inside me could no longer wait,
Took my courage in both hands and asked for a date.
We courted, we married, had kids and they grew,
And we were as happy as any we knew.
Logs on the fire and walks in the rain,
A home by the river and a place down in Spain.
She cost me in sorrow, she cost me in pain,
But if I met her tomorrow I'd do just the same;
The price of her heart was my own in exchange,
But a life spent without her was out of my range.
There was ice on the roads and the traffic was slow,
So I called her to say I'd be late getting home;
The phone just kept ringing, she wasn't there,
The house dark and empty, a note on the stair
said she'd gone with a traveller named Davy McCann,
He'd an old Transit diesel and a new caravan.
He played on the fiddle, he played on the bones,
He had one concrete mixer and three mobile phones. She cost me ..
I found them in a lay-by as snow-clouds rolled in,
I said "Have you forsaken your home and your kin?
And have you forsaken your husband and all?"
She drew off her glove as the snow began to fall. She cost ……..
I think I once saw her, she looked much the same
But her hair was more wild and her eyes were more tame;
I wanted to ask her just why she had gone,
But the lights went to green and we had to move on.
She cost me ……
First conceived in response to the line in Richard Thompson’s “Beeswing” about the price of love, this evolved into a different take on Child Ballad No 200, “Gypsy Davy”. That song celebrates the wife’s decision to leave her materialistic husband, her baby and all her possessions and go on the road with the gypsy she loves. This one tells it from the husband’s perspective.
I’ve heard doubts expressed as to whether she’d have gone off with a gypsy if it had been the middle of winter. In this version, it is.