Don't know why that "Tow row row..." got shoved to one side....

The tune identified as "One Eye'd Riley" in Septimus Winner's "Excelsior Collection for the Flute" (N.Y., 1864) is an unmistakable variant of "Paddy Will You Now?" in P.M. Haverty's "One Hundred Irish Airs," III (N .Y., 1859).

Winner's is the earliest printing I've found of a tune so titled. His and Haverty's both rather resemble the "Riley" tune used by T.S. Eliot in his 1949 play "The Cocktail Party."

J. C. Alter & R. J. Dwyer, eds.,"Journal of Captain Albert Tracy [1858] in the "Utah Historical Qly". XIII (1945): “The rich strains of our Band, then were wasted somewhat, except to our own ears, upon these echoing, empty streets and tenements [of Salt Lake City]. ...[T]he adjutant, to break the monotony of more regular marches, directed the Band to strike up that most inspiring, if less reputable air y-clept ‘One-Eyed Riley.’ The men, unfamiliar with the notes now given to the breeze, kept step as they rarely had done before, and general sense of ‘the humor of the thing’ came to prevail.”


The modern song unquestionably descends from "Paddy, Will You Now?"

In Eliot's version Riley is the narrator, not the father.

John Martin, a sailor on board the whale ship Lucy Ann (Wilmington, Del.) noted the "song" title "One eyed [sic] Riley" in his journal for Feb. 16, 1842, as being the curtain-raiser of a shipboard "concert" off the coast of Brazil. It was followed immediately by the naughty "There was a Sheppards daughter Kept sheep on yonder hill" (Child 110) and "I hit her right on her stinking machine." Stuart M. Frank lists the entire "programme" and attempts to identify the songs (most of which seem to be tamer than these opening numbers) in his 1986 Brown University dissertation.

Martin's may be the oldest reference to a song about a "One-Eyed Riley."