"Merrily" of course shares its tune with "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

William Emmett Studwell, in The Americana Song Reader, Haworth Press, 1997, writes:

"Only one year after its initial printing, 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' had received enough attention to be set to music (but not the present melody). The marriage of the now very familiar melody and lyrics took place in an 1868 collection of college songs. In that publication, Hobart College in Geneva, New York, was identified as the completed song's place of origin.

"The tune had been taken from an 1867 printing of 'Goodnight, Ladies.' .... The first part of the earlier song appeared in 1847, and 20 years later, another version added a second part, "Merrily We Roll Along." The melody for the new second section was the one used for 'Mary Had a Little Lamb.'"

[Dating "Mary Had a Little Lamb": it had been published in 1830 as a poem by Sarah Josepha Hale, and picked up its repetition lines ("little lamb, little lamb") when given its first tune by Lowell Mason in the 1830s. But as implied above, only in 1867 was it set to the "Merrily We Roll Along" tune.]

So if Studwell is correct (and he seems to have missed the 1867 printing; it should be noted that scholarship on this point is generally very shoddy), it was Hobart College students who married "Merrily" with Christie's show-closer "Good Night" (as it was originally called).

I.e. Christie had nothing to do with it, which makes sense; "Merrily" is very unlike anything in the Christie style.

The above does not answer the question of "Merrily"'s origin. But it makes clear that "Merrily We Roll Along" was known at Hobart College for Men in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York in 1867, where someone had the bright idea to turn it into a medley by joining it with a familiar minstrel song ... implying, perhaps, that it was already a familiar song tag by that time.

Can anyone trace it back into the misty past from there? My personal opinion, based on sound and style, is that "Merrily We Roll Along" is the only surviving piece of an American, or possibly British, popular song of the 1840s or 1850s.

Bob