This paper examines the evolution of The Wounded Hussar from its eighteenth-century origins to contemporary circulation in Irish traditional music, using the song and its air as a lens through which questions of transmission, authenticity, and performance practice are raised. Beginning with the Romantic-era poem and early instrumental settings, the study traces the processes through which text and melody were fixed in print, detached, recombined, and recontextualized. Particular attention is paid to collectors and revivalist mediators whose editorial decisions shaped the separation of air from text and subsequent privileging of instrumental transmission. Drawing on comparative analysis of twentieth-century performances and methodologies of Irish song scholarship (Williams and Ó Laoire 2011), the paper examines how musicians negotiate declamation, ornamentation, and variation in mimesis of an implied or remembered text. These analyses reveal the relationship between air and song to be neither stable nor hierarchical but rather continually renegotiated in performance. The revivalist assertion that airs form legitimacy from fidelity to song (Ó Riada 1982) is shown to function less as fact than ideological claim embedded within discourses of authenticity. By foregrounding multiformity and the politics of mediation (Caldwell 2025), the paper contributes to ethnomusicological discourse on the construction, authorization, and reproduction of tradition. It argues that slow air performance constitutes a critical site in which archival authority, aesthetic ideology, and individual agency intersect. In doing so, the study challenges essentialist narratives of continuity in Irish traditional music and advances a more historically contingent account of stylistic evolution and expressive authority.