The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #109339 Message #2285099
Posted By: Malcolm Douglas
11-Mar-08 - 03:46 AM
Thread Name: Origin: Dick Darby the Cobbler
Subject: RE: Help with 'Dick Darby the Cobbler'
Number 872 in the Roud Folk Song Index. It has many names and can incorporate all sorts of stuff. See the DT file Dick Darby the Cobbler for a text (no source acknowledged) and links to further material; some of it relevant. See also
Max Hunter Collection: Dick German, The Cobbler
Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads: Dick Darling the cobbler
America Singing: Dick Heuston, the cobbler and Dick darlin' the cobbler
None of this will tell you what was meant by 'camp', but in the circumstances the chances are that it didn't mean anything in particular. It may just have been a corruption of the earlier 'Kent'.
How far 'My Name is Old Hewson the Cobbler', cited by Chappell (PMOT II, 450-1) is ancestral to the numerous later songs (many of them parodies of each other) is hard to say, as we don't have the original words.