'ROUND HER NECK SHE WEARS A YELLER RIBBON
(FOR HER LOVER WHO IS FUR, FUR AWAY)
Words & Music by George A. Norton (1917)

Susie Simpkins in the village papers
Read about the soldiers manly capers,
And made up her mind,
That a soldier's bonnie bride she'd be;
Volunteers were called a little later,
Big Si Hubbard stopped a-hoeing 'taters,
Fell right into line,
And mustered with a company.
She cried and kissed him when he marched away,
And she vowed to keep him in her mind each day.

Chorus:
'Round her neck she wears a yeller ribbon,
She wears it in the winter and the summer so they say
If you ask her "Why the decoration"?
She'll say "It's fur my lover who is fur, fur away.
Fur away (fur away) fur away (fur away),
If she is milkin' cows or mowin' hay;
'Round her neck she wears a yeller ribbon,
She wears it fur her lover who is fur, fur away.

Months rolled by and patierntly she waited,
Read the war news, greatly agitated,
No word from her boy,
'Till a lettewr from his Captain said
"Your Beau Silas, he went out a-gunnin',"
Soon he had the enemy a-runnin',
Susie wept for joy,
Tho' further on the letter read;
"The enemy can run some you can bet,
But they couldn't capture Si, he's runnin' yet."

Sigmund Spaeth says that "a strange dialect song called All Round My Hat" is "unquestionably the ancestor of the later Round Her Neck She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, with all its variants and imitations." (A History of Popular Music in America, Random House, 1948, p. 83)

An American edition in the Levy collection:

Title: All Around My Hat. A New Comic Song.
Composer, Lyricist, Arranger: Written By J. Ansell, Esq.; Composed & Arranged by John Valentine.
John Valentine Publication: Boston: Oliver Ditson, 115 Washington St., n.d..
Form of Composition: strophic with chorus
Instrumentation: piano and voice
First Line: 'Twas a going of my rounds, in the street I first did meet her
First Line of Chorus: All round my hat, I vears a green villow
Performer: as Sung by Mr. Jack Reeve, with unbounded applause
Subject: Humorous pictures
Subject: Mules
Subject: Vegetables
Subject: Eating & drinking
Subject: Courtship & love
Subject: Peddlers
Subject: Gifts
Subject: Marriage
Call No.: Box: 046 Item: 008

~Masato