Thanks, Dicho - but those are pretty much the same lyrics attributed to Newton in 1779.
The lyrics I have start out with the first verse of your 1808 version ("How tedious and tasteless..."), and the 1927 verses are stuck in the midst of them. Not that these are a bad set of lyrics, mind ye; I just wonder what originaly went with that "Greenfields" tune before Newton got a hold of it.
The melody and meter suggest a love song or bitter-sweet ballad somehow, and crys out "(something - something)...Greeeen - Fields", but nowhere does the phrase occur in Newton's verses. It just makes a lot of sense to me that the original song had something to do with "Green Fields" somehow.

While I'm at it; in the collection we have found severeal variations of the tune under various names, such as "Farewell to Green Fields", "Greenfields" as one or two words, etc., not all of them having a lot in common with each other. As has been observed previously; mixing, matching, switching and swapping melodies and lyrics around with gay abandon (remember, that word used to mean something else back then)was commonplace, and the authenticity of about any workable combination is probably about as historically credible as any of them which appear written on the same page in a period book.

Here's another kink in the hose for a Historical Musician (I guess we might be considered an archaic branch of the "Folk Music" genre, although not all of the music we do was or is strictly "Folk", per se.); I have heard variations of common songs that remind me very much of a HARMONY LINE of the root tune. Example; an early version of "John Brown's Body" is distinctly different from the more familiar "Battle Hymn of the Republic" which was supposedly based on the former tune, but when I listen to a Choral presentation of the "Hymn", I could about swear I hear the Baritone singing what sounds a lot like the earlier "John Brown's" lead or Tenor. Might Mrs. Alcott have used one of the harmony lines of "Brown's" on which to base her monumental "Battle Hymn"... or was it just another "version" of the same old song, only really just another one of the 4 vocal parts in which most of the music of the day was written and performed?
Did some singers just stick with whatever line was best suited to their vocal range and sing that one, rather than bother with transposing? One might almost consider each harmony line a seperate and distinct yet overlying melody or "song", sharing harmonic intervals and metrical "skeleton". Might each one, by itself, be considered a "variation on a theme"? I speculate that here might have been a lot of mixing and matching going on between melody and harmony lines, as well as meters and lyrics.

In order to have an old song or Hymn come out sounding "right", I usually (not always) can't just get away with singing the Tenor line all the way through, as conventional musical wisdom suggests; Instead I frequently "pick" notes, groups, or progressions out of the other 3 lines as well. I think that Soloists of the period routinely "distilled" a part song down like this, and writers probably broke a simple folk tune they'd collected in a local Pub or cotton field somewhere up into harmony parts by sharing or distributing the root melody around throughout all 4 parts, with the majority or nucleus of the air generally, but not exclusively, settling around the Tenor line. I have observed that the melody of one of these old songs "...skips around the harmony parts like St. Elmo's fire through the rigging of a clipper ship in a thunderstorm". Whether my theory holds water in academic circles or not may be up for debate - but I use it in my arrangements and interpretations of archaic period peices, and will continue to do so, as I think that the resulting melodies seem much more "natural" and resolved somehow.

And yes, Dicho; I'll PM the E-dress, and would love to keep in touch with fellow affectionados of the 18th & 19th Century Music of History - Sacred and Secular.

In Remembrance of Them;

"Uncle Jaque", Yarmouth Maine, USA

3rd Maine Infantry Regimental Field Music