Although I really do think that The Rose of Allandale is irrelevant to this discussion (though it does have the word "rose" in the title, which I suppose may confuse beginners) it seems to be necessary to say a few words about it in order to correct some misapprehensions stated earlier in this recently revived thread.

It is an English parlour song, though as has been mentioned here, and in other threads, it entered the repertoire of the Copper family of Rottingdean in Sussex; so far as I can tell, all arrangements of the song recorded by revival performers such as Mary Black are based (often at several removes) upon their modification of it, which is a great deal more interesting, musically, than the original. Any suggestion that the song is "trad" is due to laziness or deliberate mendacity on the part of performers or record companies; it is well known who wrote the song, and it was widely published in popular songbooks during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was not until the late 1960s that "folk" artists picked up on the Copper's modified form of the song, and there is little excuse for mis-representing it in the way that many seem to have done. The Copper's recording, incidentally, properly credited the original composers; though it appears that a lot of people didn't bother to read that bit.

Mary Black, unfortunately, regularised the phrasing and turned it into something like a Country and Western number, and a good few people have since copied her handling of it, which owes its best post-Copper features to Nic Jones (not Martin Carthy, as wrongly suggested earlier), often under the mistaken impression that it is in some way an Irish song. As she recorded it, it is merely pretty rather than beautiful.

Does anyone have anything further -and substantive- to say about The Rose of Tralee? The original two verses were out on broadsides at least as early as the 1860s (and there was at least one parody current at that time, too); the story given in the earlier link looks superficially convincing, but I have to wonder how much of the circumstantial detail is attested, and how much invented.