Hey, Artful, if I wanted to dream up my own lyrics, I could be a rap star! But seriously, the idea is to set the historical record straight. If the Fifes did their job (and they certainly were very meticulous), they found only one bawdy version of this song among the Lomax papers. Logsdon offers nothing new.

A century ago, the illusion was that folksongs were all very wholesome. Nowadays many people seem to want to believe the opposite, that there was a reserve of orgiastic lyrics that everybody except the prudes who ran things was singing all the time.

Both views, it seems to me, are innacurate. But we can't know the truth without looking for it.

At the moment, it seems that there was indeed a coherent bawdy version of this song, though my guess is it was rather more down to earth than the typical "rugby song." My guess also is that it was not widely sung or else we would find more traces of it.