I agree that the original author probably had a tune in mind when (s)he wrote the song.

Yes, Pious Friends, by Shay, was '28. But it (the book) is EDITED BY Shay. When was the song written? By whom? I certainly don't know. I used to have "Pious Friends" as well as "More Pious Friends", but both of them are long gone.

The fact that Shay says "any tune" merely means (to me) that HE doesn't know the tune, and presumably doesn't care. That doesn't mean there wasn't a tune or tunes extant in '28, one of which could have been the original.

In any case, the tune I learned from Amsterdam works wonderfully, BOTH VERSE AND CHORUS, and doesn't require any editing of the words to fit, as mentioned in some of the posts above.

Dave Oesterreich