A.L. Lloyd's note to 'Barney' on the Watersons LP:
"A stage song favoured by Irish comedians from the 1860s on. During the 1880s, apparently on American University campuses, close harmony groups remade it in to the better-known—and even more preposterous—My Bonny lies over the ocean. Watersons had this from Bob Davenport who learnt it from a Frank Quinn 78."

Wolfgang