Note this post from Ewan McVicar:

Thread #6378   Message #36956
Posted By: Ewan McV
03-Sep-98 - 06:32 PM
Thread Name: Who wrote Polly Wolly Doodle
Subject: RE: Who wrote Polly Wolly Doodle

Joe Offer

You are confirming my thoughts, that PWD is maybe an actual trad song - i.e. nobody knows who wrote it. Mind you, we could both probably name a half dozen songs that we've heard called trad because no-one bothered to look in a book. My favourite is a Swahili pop song called Malaika which was in the Top Twenty in Nairobi when I lived there in 1963, written by a guy called Fadhali William, I think. It keeps appearing as a traditional Tanzanian lullaby, and FW never gets any royalties, because the singers claim the arrangement. I've read that in the Swedish copyright index there are twenty different claimed composers of Malaika - in Swahili! The composers include all four members of Abba. It's a jolly old world.

Thanks for looking. Ewan