Jeez, Art! Don't egg 'em on! Your kind words are much more gracious than the album deserves. However, it did contain some good songs, didn't it?

I believe it was Dorothy Canfield Fisher who told Eloise Hubbard Linscott that her family tradition said that her ancestors marched to the song in the American War for Independence. I try not to sing it as fast as many seem to want to take it, trying to find a more "marching" pace. I just heard a tape of Sam Hinton's Library of Congress recording of it, couched among many songs from his west Texas boyhood. I don't know where Sam learned it.

There was a thread about this song family awhile back. Was it about "I Know Where I'm Going" (a version usually considered to be Irish)? Anyway, I connect the song to the Scottish "Licht Bob's Lassie" and "Aye Waukin' O." These are primarily textual relationships, although the "Licht Bob's Lassie," as Isobel Sutherland used to sing it, was sung to the same tune as "I Know Where I'm Going." I consider "Katy Cruel" to be an American member of this extended song family.

Sandy