G'day, It might be worthwhile expanding on GUEST,mumhnach's remark, of 26 May 01 - 09:42 AM about the application of the same tune to "Frank the Poet's" words that became the song Moreton Bay as well as Big Tim's, of 26 May 01 - 02:53 PM about Boolavogue being given this tune in the (19)20s.

Mayhew, in his book on "The London Poor" notes that most of the ballad-hawkers on the streets of London, in 1850, were Irish (very many of them driven from Ireland by the Great Hunger). They bought broadsheets of ballads from jobbing printers and "sang" their wares to sell the sheets. Mayhew says the most common tune used, at that time, was Youghal Harbour - so many of the purchasers of broadsheets would have had that tune firmly in their minds ... for a great range of old ballads.

In the late 1940s/early 1950s, when Australian poet /musicologist /sometime collector John Manifold decided to publish some modern "broadsheets" (The Bandicoot Ballads) with artist (and, latterly incredibly prolific collector /publisher /cataloguer) Ron Edwards ... one of these was his conscious "reconstruction" of Frank's poem "A Lament for Captain Logan" - as Moreton Bay. Manifold combined a numer of fragments he heard from friends and family with an edited version of the known poem by Frank and concluded that the fragments of tune appeared to come from Youghal Harbour ... so he set the result to this tune, which has since remained very popular in the folk revival.

It was not until something like 20 years later that a field-collected version of the whole song was found - by Hugh Anderson, a thousand miles south in Victoria - collecting from an old agricultural worker Simon McDonald. Simon's word, whilst clearly drawing on Frank's, are very different in style, wording and content from Manifold's well-known version ... and his tune, while it can be seen to relate to Youghal Harbour, is very different from the Paddy Galvin Boolavogue tune Manifold used, note-for-note.

I think this vindicates Manifold's guess ... and indicates that the Australian song Moreton Bay picked up this tune independently from (and earlier than!) the attachment to McCall's word. There's nothing special about this conclusion - apart from a reassurance that we haven't been simply 'ripping off an Irish tune because it became popularly attached to an Irish 'Rebel Song' in the 20th century.

Incidentally, it's my impression that the closest relative I have heard to Simon McDonald's tune is a song I heard Vin Garbutt sing some decades back: On the Road to Youghal ... a rather more sprightly tale of the same part of the world. I hoped Vin might be able to give me more background ... but, alas, not so far!

Regards,

Bob Bolton