Even if the song didn't originate in the American colonies, it came, in American versions , to actually BE about the town of Lynn in Massachusetts during colonial times. That's what it meant to me when I found it in the Old Town School Of Folk Music's teaching songbook and that's what I told students it meant when I showed it to them. I doubt I was wrong even if the song originally came from the old Soviet Union like Pavel Chekov (remember him?) said it did in an old episode of Star Trek. ;-)

Art Thieme