Oops! Why should I sit on my hands like a useless maiden and wait for some knight (or lady) in shining armour to arrive with the answer to #10. why don't I look it up myself.

Although I can only hear a vague similarity to the Goddesses tune.

The link to America is that some versions say North Amerikay rather than North Country.

Helen

http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/~gillard/watersons/earlyn.html 8. The North Country Maid

This familiar song can be found in a black letter copy also in the Roxburgh Collection. There, it's titled: The Northern Lasse's Lamentation: or the Unhappy Maid's Misfortune, and it's prefaced by a few melancholy lines:

Since she did from her friends depart, No earthly thing can cheer her heart, But still she doth her case lament Being always fill'd with discontent, Resolving to do nought but mourn Till to the North she doth return.

J. Collingwood Bruce and John Stokoe printed a set of the song in their Northumbrian Minstrelsey of 1882 noting how: Sir Walter Scott, in his novel Rob Roy, makes the narrator of the tale (Francis Osbaldiston) in recounting recollections of his childhood, tells how his Northumbrian nurse (old Mabel) amused him by singing the ditties of her native countie, and specially names O! the oak and the Ash and the bonny Ivy Tree as a Northumbrian ballad.'

The stately tune started life as a dance tune, found in many places and under many titles but especially in Sir James Hawkin's Transcripts of music for the virginals, and the Dancing master, of 1650, under the title Goddesses.

The refrain in all its home-sick nostalgia may be encountered, oddly enough, in the robust and unbuttoned sailor's song, Home, Dearie Home, or Rosemary Lane.