"Black Velvet Band" is a transport ballad: a love story that ends, within a few verses, in a courtroom and a one-way trip to Van Diemen's Land. A young apprentice meets a woman wearing her hair tied back with a black velvet band, falls for her, and pays for it with seven years on the far side of the world.

It is one of the most singable songs in our set, and one of the most widely travelled. It is also worth saying plainly: there is no single true story behind it. It is a broadside ballad — a fiction sold cheaply on printed sheets — and its history is the history of the song itself, moving between England and Ireland and out to Australia with the convicts whose sentence it describes.

A Gold Watch in His Hand: The Story in the Song

The plot turns on one object: a gold watch. The woman steals it from a passing gentleman and puts it into the apprentice's hand. He is arrested, and the next morning he is in court with the stolen watch as the evidence against him. The judge gives him seven years' penal servitude in Van Diemen's Land.

The detail matters because it is what makes the ballad work. The apprentice is not a thief and not a rebel — just a working lad whose only crime was being flattered by a pretty stranger's attention, and the system does not care. The chorus carries his warning — beware of the pretty colleens — but the verses are sadder than the warning suggests: he still describes the woman in romantic terms even as he counts the cost of meeting her.

The song is catalogued as Roud 2146. Broadside versions set it on the Ratcliffe Highway in London, while collected versions place it in London, Belfast, Tralee, Bedfordshire, and Dunmanway in County Cork. The story stayed the same; the hometown changed to wherever the singer was standing.

Seven Years in Van Diemen's Land: What Transportation Meant

The sentence in the song was a real one, handed down in real courts for exactly this class of offence. Between 1788 and 1868, more than 162,000 convicts were transported from Britain and Ireland to Australia, and about a quarter of them were Irish. Van Diemen's Land alone — now Tasmania — received some 67,000 convicts from England and Ireland between 1803 and 1853.

Seven years was a standard sentence, and for most who received it, it was effectively exile for life: even a convict who served his time rarely had the money for the passage home. The apprentice, transported for a watch he did not steal, stood inside a system that moved tens of thousands the same way.

We sing the other end of that system in Back Home in Derry, where the men in the hold are political prisoners rather than a duped apprentice, and in The Auld Triangle, where the prison is in Dublin and no ship is involved at all. The apprentice's story is the ordinary version of the same machinery: no cause, no rebellion, just a bad night and a judge.

From a Norfolk Farm Singer to The Dubliners: How It Became an Irish Standard

Here is the odd fact at the centre of the song's modern life. The version that made it an Irish standard — The Dubliners' 1967 recording — was adapted from a version Ewan MacColl recorded in 1955 from Harry Cox, a traditional singer and farm labourer from Norfolk, in England.

So the "Irish" version came through an English singer. That is not an embarrassment; it is the normal way this music worked. Songs crossed the Irish Sea in both directions for centuries, and a good ballad belonged to whoever was singing it. The Dubliners took Cox's version, through MacColl, and put it in Dublin accents at pub speed — and from then on it was an Irish song, whatever its route there.

The same year, 1967, the Irish Rovers took the song to a multi-million-selling record in the United States: in a single year, one broadside ballad was carried into the charts by a Dublin band at home and an Irish band abroad. Its closest cousin in our set is Whiskey in the Jar, the other ballad of a young man, a woman, and the law — though that narrator at least fights back.

To dig further: the National Museum of Australia's page on convicts sent to Australia covers the transportation system behind the sentence, and Wikipedia's article on “The Black Velvet Band” covers the song's Roud number, broadside settings, and recording history. Inside Irish Music also takes up this song directly, asking how “The Black Velvet Band” got so popular in Ireland.

— hear us play it live (video above).