G'day all,

This ditty seems to have attracted many new sets of words over the years. I have a (Dover~?) collection of early American sheet music (possibly a collection of "Irish" ... mostly written in America by music industry types of suspiciously middle European surnames) which has a version that seems to have 3 or 4 different sets of lyrics, all strung together into one long, rambling song. This includes the WWI lyrics with the German submarine.

The tune was well known among "Bush" musicians all this century and my group "Backblocks" plays a locally collected (but pretty familiar) version in one of our dance sets. So far no one has been game to sing their way through the full set of lyrics at the same time ... I think the dancers might revolt!

Regards,

Bob Bolton