If that's the "Cuckoo's Nest" in the DT beginning like that, Dick should be able to tell you where he got it (I'd like to know myself, Dick!). Grit Laskin's amusing song is a parody of this, as comparison will show. A bit of the song is in Kenneth Peacock's "Songs of the Newfoundland Outports", 258, collected in 1960, as a specimen of "chin music" or diddling ("Da dal la da da" etc.), with a stanza [just the one] very close to the 2nd in the DT text ("Oh some love the girls who are pretty in the face" etc.). The tune in Peacock is a version of the Scots one in Buchan and Hall, from the great Jeannie Robertson. The air is sometimes called merely "Sailor's Hornpipe" (as in Allan's Collection of Reels, 39), but more usually "Jacky Tar," which is in the Scots Musical Museum IV (1792), no. 321, to Burns' version of Ayton's "I do confess". The commentator Stenhouse calls it "The Cuckoo," which has a Jacobite song in Hogg. Another version, in the major this time, is in Rutherford's Complete Collection of the most celebrated Country Dances III (ca. 1770). Later, it's in the minor, as in Aird's Selections I (1782), titled "Come "Ashore, Jolly Tar and your trowsers on", from another set of words. Bunting claims it as Irish [which it might well be], finding it in a music book of 1723. O'Neill, Music of Ireland (1903), 322, gives two sets of The Cuckoo's Nest -- #1733 is the more familiar one, #1734, more or less the same, but with 3 strains *in the major*.

That any help?

Cheers

Murray