I searched my "iTunes" (half the time I don't know what's in there) and I found I had 2 recordings of "Shiny O!"!

The first is by Bristol Shantymen. It is quite faithful to the Hatfield article -- which I assume is the only source for this song (?). They follow all the lyrics (except to drop a few words that don't fit the melody well). They have harmonized it in a way that sounds maybe "Celtic" (?) somehow to my ear. The only melodic changes they've made are that: 1. Instead of articulating the rhythm of the third measure (start of the first chorus), it becomes just a wavering/ornamented descending line; 2. In the last measure, it sounds like they are singing a flat 7th (Eb) rather than natural (E), which gives the song more of a "modal" quality.

I also have a recording from Stan Hugill. He is wearing his "Folk Revivalist" hat. This is an instructive example, that should be heeded by the few :) people that think Hugill was unimpeachably "authentic." It's evident that he has just picked this song up in the Revival. He introduces it by saying that (paraphrasing) "came from a White man who heard these 3 Negros singing this on a ship from Philadelphia to Genoa a good many years ago"! Translation: Hatfield notated it from a crew of Jamaicans on the way from Pensacola to Nice in 1886. He goes on to sing the Hatfield lyrics ("correcting" brandy to rhyme with dandy), but to a totally different melody. The audience never does catch on to the melody of the chorus, so either his version was unfamiliar to them, or the song itself was brand new.

Who was first to revive this song from print? Was Hugill's random melody something he made up after looking at the text, or after hearing someone?

And so there seems to have developed two revival versions of this -- one of which has a non-traditional melody.