Desert Dancer: "Leenia, which side of the pond was your father born on & singing on?"

A: the left side, if you're looking north. born in Colorado, grew up in Chicagoland. He probably learned the song in school there.

Declan: "sellers would have used that sort of sing song lilt to advertise their goods"

A: Try singing it with the ascending notes and then insert a small rest afters the l in "mussels" It sounds more like a street cry.

as for "although there's some that say she sold other things as well. Her Dublin statue has been christened the Tart with the Cart by local wits."

Since Molly Malone was a fictional character, she couldn't ever have done anything not ascribed to her in the song. "Local half-wits" would be more like it -- the kind of people who think words have particular validity if they rhyme.

Everyone: Now for the sermon. There's no law that says every refrain has to be identical. Sing it one way one time, another way the other time. Let her father&mother have one version, Molly herself the other. Sing one refrain loud and another soft. Have her ghost sing a refrain that's barely audible, lost in the traffic sounds of modern Dublin.

Try not to create the impression that a sound engineer simply pressed a repeat button to produce an unvarying refrain. Leave unvarying refrains to the big recording stars who can't get through a whole song without help.