G. Legman, editing the Randolph collection of what were once considered "unprintable" songs, now printed by the University of Arkansas in two volumes: Roll Me in Your Arms and Blow the Candle Out, refers (in the first volume cited, pages 137-139) to an ur text titled "The Rover" which he dates to the 1790s. The more modern "One Eyed Riley" (in the version I learned in 1948, "One Ball Riley") text that he reports was collected from a Mena, Arkansas, fellow who had learned his "broad repertory" of bawdy songs during World War II or in the decade before it.

Legman tells us that his private archive contains over thirty examples of the song. He again refers to it as being derived from a "light-hearted eighteenth-century British ballad of erotic adventure."

See also page 228 of Ed Cray's The Erotic Muse, where he notes that a fragment of the song figures in the first act of T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party. Oscar Brand says the version included in his Songs of Raking and Roving is "at least 100 years old." I think there can be no doubt that what we have here is a traditional song of unknown authorship with a long history of oral transmission.

Sandy