the notes to this song from TOPICs 'New Voices' LP where I know this song from:

'Till the middle of the nineteenth century the Tyne was too shallow for sizeable ships to come upriver and load the coal direct from the riverside staiths. Instead, the coal was sculled from the staiths downriver by means of flat barges called 'keels'. The keelmen were notoriously a rough independent vivid lot, and songs about them are numerous, in praise or otherwise. This one is otherwise. The genial and somewhat eccentric John Bell first collected the song when he was scouring the northeastern countryside to put together his collection of Rhymes of Northern Bards (1812).'

Wolfgang