Hi Azizi:

"Disobliging" was Bert's word for songs of an overtly sexual, or what would once have been called 'improper', content: his euphemism for what one source singer is on record as having refused to sing to the early lady collector Priscilla Wyatt-Edgell because it was, he said, 'outway rude'.

I recall his using the word repeatedly in a folk club session [the first of his I ever heard] at the Nancy Whiskey Skiffle-&-Folk Club at the Princess Louise pub in High Holborn, London, in 1956. He started off by saying he was going to sing some English love songs: then sang a series of songs like 'My husband's got no courage in him', saying several times, "So you see there is a tradition in English love songs for them to be a little 'disobliging'."

The words for 'black cat' quoted by Sandy Paton as having heard me sing in London all those years ago were the whole of the song as I knew it. Howver, it did come to me as a children's song [my friend Leslie remembered singing it in childhood, as I said, among his friends in the East End], so should fit in among your interests.

All best - Michael