Songfacts®:

• This was a very personal song for Thin Lizzy leader Phil Lynott. The "little girl in bloom" with a secret "she carries in her womb" is Lynott's mother, Philomena, who ran away from Dublin to England and in 1949, at age 18, gave birth to Phil out of wedlock. Growing up, Lynott never knew his father - a Guyanese immigrant named Cecil Parris, who went by the nickname "The Duke." After a tough and transitory early life in the north of England with his mother, young Phil was sent to live with his grandmother in Crumlin, a housing estate on Dublin's Southside.
  
  Nearly two decades later, history came close to repeating itself. In 1968, Lynott fathered a son who was given up for adoption without the singer ever setting eyes on him. That son, Macdaragh Lambe, would not learn who his father was until 2003.
  
  In the song, Lynott sings simultaneously as both abandoned child and absent father - two roles he knew in painfully real ways. As The Guardian put it, "these complex familial currents flood into 'Little Girl In Bloom.'" >>>

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• When journalist Geoff Barton noted in a 1974 Sounds interview that "Little Girl In Bloom" struck him as one of Lynott's most personal exercises, Lynott confirmed as much - though he was reluctant to elaborate. "Sure I can talk about the book as a book alone - but the minute you sort of go into particular poems, it gets so embarrassing," he said. "I figure I've said it the way I want to say it, so why should I expand upon it?"
• "Little Girl In Bloom" appears on Vagabonds Of The Western World, Thin Lizzy's third studio album, released in 1973. It was a pivotal record - the last to feature original guitarist Eric Bell and the first with artwork by Jim Fitzpatrick, who would go on to become a signature visual presence for the band.
  
  Musically, the song signaled what was to come, with overlapping lead vocals and the soon-to-be-familiar twining of two electric guitars, a sound that helped define Thin Lizzy's classic mid-'70s lineup.