I have a copy of Herbert Hughes four volumes of "Irish Country Songs". In the preface to volume three, written in 1934, he has quite a long discussion of this song... too long for me to transcribe here. The name of the town in the first line is "Athy". In part, he writes..."But further research dated it back, conjecturally, to the period immediately succeeding the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, when, as H. H. Sparling pointed out, Irish regiments were extensively recruited for the East India service. In his 'Irish Minstrelsy" (Walter Scott, 1887) Sparling described it as a street ballad in which "the island of Ceylon " is given as "the island of Sulloon"; and in the complete edition of that work he made the following note:
Because in one late version, "Why did you run from me and the child?" is made "Why did you skedaddle," etc., and this word only came into use during the War of Secession, some have imagined this song to be of recent date, and have even attributed it to the Irish American music halls. My own memory carries it back to very near the war, when I heard an old fisherman sing it, to whom it was even then old. It was he who told me of its age and meaning, what I have said above, which is corroborated by the reference to Ceylon. It is hard to believe that any one can read this wonderful piece of grotesquerie, with its mingling of pathos and ribald mockery so closely allied to the spirit that produced "The night before Larry was stretched," and be unable to see either its value or its genuineness."
Hughes goes on about an American doggeral writer who told Hughes he wanted to write a song that was a "hit", and so one must be "reminiscent" if a song was to be a "hit". Hughes, to the American's puzzlement, refused to collaborate in exploiting Irish folk music in order to assist the man in creating a "hit". He goes on to write..
... The sentiment created on both sides of the Atlantic by the War of Secession was certainly worth exploiting. Thus far, then, my friends had good excuse for associating the song with that epoch."
Hughes carefully established the song's pre-Civil War Irish origin. Alice