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User Name Thread Name Subject Posted
Ewan McV Origins: Polly Wolly Doodle (78* d) RE: Who wrote Polly Wolly Doodle 03 Sep 98


Joe Offer

You are confirming my thoughts, that PWD is maybe an actual trad song - i.e. nobody knows who wrote it. Mind you, we could both probably name a half dozen songs that we've heard called trad because no-one bothered to look in a book. My favourite is a Swahili pop song called Malaika (click) which was in the Top Twenty in Nairobi when I lived there in 1963, written by a guy called Fadhali William, I think. It keeps appearing as a traditional Tanzanian lullaby, and FW never gets any royalties, because the singers claim the arrangement. I've read that in the Swedish copyright index there are twenty different claimed composers of Malaika - in Swahili! The composers include all four members of Abba. It's a jolly old world.

Thanks for looking. Ewan


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