G'day,
GUEST,Janice:

I reckon we have a different Alan Offa ... he was a mouth organ player, born in 1920 at Kingaroy, Queensland, Australia ... presumably descended from the 1880s wave of "Germanic" immigrants (the last refugees from Bismarck's conquest [aka "Unification"] of the independent German states).

Many of this group settled as farmers in the south-east parts of Queensland and still maintain strong German traditions ... despite prejuduce arising from two World Wars - basically against the Germans that their ancestors came to Australia to avoid! Parts of Eva's family would also trace their Australian period to that migration.

Alan's version of Man You Don't Meet Every Day, which I use with a very pretty version of its waltz tune, collected from another "Germanic"-Australian, Ernie Goodman in New South Wales, is a short portion of an American version of the song, that came to Alan via his father from an Irishman, Paddy Fitzgerald, with whom he worked down south in Victoria ... around 1900.

I think that comprises a fairly good Australian pedigree for a song fragment!

Regards,

Bob