This is Zimmermann's note, virtually complete, his source is as given Haly in Cork; in Trinity College Dublin, (White collection)
His date, 1798, refers to the events in the song.
Jim Carroll

Three anonymous texts given in Part 2 and told in a naive fashion represent the main types of narrative street songs with political subjects popular in nineteenth cen¬tury Ireland.

The first of them, «The Croppy Boy» (song 19), though often reprinted on broadsides is closer than the others to oral folk song, as is shown by the number of its variants and by formal details. As can be seen from the two families of tunes to which it may be sung, and from some of its lines too, this text is related to two groups of songs found in England and America as well as in Ireland, dating probably from the eighteenth century. The tune given by Joyce, and the opening line evoking spring, are akin to the song called «My Boy Willie», «Sweet William» or «The Sailor Boy». The tunes given by Bunting and Petrie, for instance, belong to the ballad «The Robber», also known as «Charley Reilly», «In Newry Town» or «The Bold and Undaunted Youth » , which has very similar lines   too:

... Taken I was by that cursed crew.
My father cried for his darling son,
My wife cried I am undone,
My mother she tore her white locks ...

The song consists of a series of short scenes conveyed by a commentary in the first person, with a transfer from the subjective to the objective form in the last stanza of some variants. Action is suggested rather than detailed. There is little regard for motivation and for circumstantial ac¬curacy, much is left to the imagination: as to why and where the Croppy Boy was arrested and how his cousin betrayed him, it remains for the listener to guess, if he wants to. Some passages have been selected as most dramatic, others do not advance the story but please the audience with the recurrence of familiar lines (the «drum and fife» episode, for instance).    The traditional device of «incremental repetition is used to introduce different scenes: the progression in the street, before the family house, up the hill. It follows the favourite folk song device of arranging incidents in three, and lingers at some stage of the action, with the result that suspense is created and tension worked up. The series of parents, brother, sister, etc., introduced in successive stanzas, was also a favourite device in folk ballads. The setting is only hinted at through a few details: the trees where birds are singing, the guardhouse and parlour where the hero is tried, the successive stations on his road to Duncannon or New Geneva. The important thing is the emotional succession of short scenes evoked through very simple means, the transition from the happiness in the first stanza to «low spirit» in the third, the appearance of the parents mute and terror-stricken, at the door of their house, then the «deep distress» of the sister running down the stairs, the crying of the hero while going up the hill... The pathos of a few details (the mother's gesture of despair, for instance) and the nai've tone of the rest of the narrative combine to give the song an undeniable charm. «The Croppy Boy», however, differs from the strict ballad form — the «Child ballad)) — mainly in being more lyrical and in making no use of the traditional series of questions and answers, or of any form of dialogue.