Martin, how embarrassing. Indeed, the "Hughes" quotation I supplied -though quoted (and sourced) by Hughes - certainly did come from Sparling. I apologize and plead an imperfect memory plus the lateness of the hour.

I now have the Hughes book in front of me, and he makes two fundamental observations of his own on the subject:

"'Johnny, I hardly knew ye'...is a song I have remembered since I was a child [Hughes was born in 1882], sung in Ireland to the tune of 'Johnny comes marching home,' which tune has appeared in popular collections as 'old English.' When I first thought of putting it in this volume I discussed the song with my father, who is in his eighty-second year...and [with] others whose memories went back to the American Civil War, or a little after. Without being dogmatic, they agreed that it belonged to that period and came from the States, Sir Richard Terry remarking that it was probably in the repertory of the Christy Minstrels."

Does anyone know what "collections" Hughes was referring to?

No 19th Century American printed text of "JIHKY" is known - and the song seems never to have been reported by folksong collectors as having been sung in the U.S. One tends to believe, therefore, that Hughes's sources (or H. himself at some point) must have been confusing "JIHKY" with "WJCMHA." That would be easy to do since the American melody as well as Gilmore's lyrics are both known as "WJCMHA." But none of those sources indicated that either Gilmore's tune or the words to "JIHKY" dated back before the Civil War.

Hughes then discusses Geoghegan's song, which the sheet music rtells us was "sung with tremendous applause by harry Liston, the star comic." Hughes quotes the Geoghegan melody and asserts that it "recall[s]" the melody of Gilmore's song as though "the composer's memory was at fault." (I don't agree with this but my mind is open on the subject.) Hughes goes on to ask, "Is it too much to suppose" that JBG "considered that a good old ballad was anybody's property?"

Well, yes, it is too much. There remains no good or credible evidence that that "JIHKY" existed before ca1867, or that Gilmore simply attached his own lyrics to a familiar Irish melody that already carried words about "Johnny" more or less "marching home again."


Hughes's argument seems to be that the testimony of Sparling's old fisherman negates all the other evidence that "JIHKY" first appeared after, not before, the Civil War.

As for Gilmore's tune. It is often said that it was known before 1862-63 under the title "Johnny, Fill Up the Bowl" And those words are indeed recorded as appearing in American Civil War parodies of "WJCMHA." But despite the tune's appearance in O'Neill's "Music of Ireland" (1905, No. 468, p. 82), no one has discovered a pre-Civil War song of that name or, need it be said, even a reference to a melody of that name. (O'Neill also gives the title in Irish as "lion suas an cupana seanin"; he names all 1,850 of his tunes in both languages - and not one is "title unknown"!)

So we're back where we started. Except that Volgadon and Jack Campin are correct that "parody" may not be the ideal word for "JIHKY" in Geoghegan's form. How about "spoof" or "burlesque"? Certainly the structure of the stanzas (though not of the chorus) is that of Gilmore's song.

O'Neill made a few comments on Gilmore's tune in "Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melody" (1922), p. 52. I'll post these later this p.m., along with Gilmore's testimony - just for the record.