Boy, am I glad Guest/Nicole resurrected this thread. Back in April, I wasn't here to read it the first time around.

I heard this song -- maybe just once -- sometime within the last 2-3 years, and got a big kick out of it. Never learned it, and by now I've forgotten the melody. Maybe this'll be my motivation learn the midi-conversion software.

One thing I *did* remember -- as I read the lyrics, I knew immediately that the line after "I don't mean to shout" is supposed to be shouted.

I wonder if a tune like this falls short of the "Is It Folk Music" standard for some tradition-minded folks. If there's anything that true folk art is NOT, it's commercial entertainment written deliberately for mass dissemination -- and this kind of music hall ditty is a great example of that very phenomenon, from a very early generation of hit-factory popular music, back at the dawn of the mass-media age.

Hey, don't get me wrong -- I really *like* "Casey's Hat," and don't really care how anyone classifies it. I just have a hunch that it's not really "Irish traditional" music (and that there might probably some Irish-traditional musicians who wouldn't play it). Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm guessing that even though it's from *an* Irish tradition (the music hall tradition), it may not belong to *the* Irish tradition, along with the jigs and reels and old ballads for which there are no known individual composers.

Too much thread creep? Or is anyone interested enough to add anything?