Singing this to myself whilst toddling around Fakenham in the blazingly precocious summer sunshine last week, pondering its provenance, ante-Bellamy, which brings me to this thread.

Picking up the fiddle I find the tune is a breeze that scans out the words to rare perfection. Here we have Trad Idiomatic intention & awareness with none of the self-consciousness folksiness of the revival. To me it reads like the efforts of a Broadside Hack, but sings like something far purer somehow, which of course a lot of Broadsides do (Out With My Gun etc.). I can well imagine an old fellow versed in the popular idioms of the early 20th century (music hall, Trad Songs, Broadsides & all) freestyling his verses to commemorate just such an encounter howe'er so casual in the raggle-taggle* mingling of the carnival.

One thing though - I'd love to hear Jim Eldon singing this; can anyone help??

* Forgive me; I'm currently immersed in Starkie's vagbondian trilogy so such things are on my mind just now, hence my interest in the song & the perceived exoticism from which it derives.