OK, I'll admit my previous thread name was a bit too obscure: - G'day Youghal required Australian Idiom plus Irish Gaelic pronunciation!

Anyway, I was inspired by the wonderful experts on Irish songs that so deftly fielded the details - and geography - of Boulavogue.

I am after words to 2 related songs; 'Youghal Harbour' and 'The Road to Youghal'. My reasons follow (at great length!)

I was set by the Boulavogue thread toward other versions and variants on the same tune ('Youghal Harbour'). Here in Australia we sing a convict song "Moreton Bay". The original poem was by 'Frank the Poet', an Irish convict transported in 1832. Many of Frank's poems went off and became songs (including the ancestor of all those versions of "The Wild Colonial Boy").

In 1952 the folklorist John Manifold put together a "singer's text" from a number of fragments of Frank's sardonically named 'A Convict's Lament for the Death of Captain Logan' and (presumably having some clue to the tune) set it to 'Youghal Harbour', the tune used for 'Boulavogue'. Some years later (` 1960)a complete song was learned from a rural worker in Victoria, Simon MacDonald. He had learned the song from an uncle, many decades before and, indeed, used a variant of the 'Youghal Harbour' tune.

This tune is more "jiggy" in nature than the dignified 'Youghal Harbour' of 'Boulavogue' and Manifold's version of 'Moreton Bay'. It reminds me of a song I heard Vin Garbutt sing about 15 years ago - 'The Road to Youghal'. This has a more sprightly pace, suiting its saucy words but the tune is quite like Simon McDonald's.

The real trouble, for me, is that careful re-listening to all these tunes has whetted my appetite and I would like to:

a) sing 'The Road to Youghal' - but there are 2 or 3 words I can't make out on my tape recording of the concert ... and I don't have the song on any of my Vin Garbutt vinyl.

b) learn the old words to 'Youghal Harbour' so that I can compare them with the later songs and study the changes and relationships. I know that 'Youghal Harbour' was described by Mayhew, in his seminal (1850 - 1860) studies of the London poor as the most popular tune used by 'Ballad Chaunters', who sang from the broadsheets that they hawked and I feel it is important to the history and formation of Australian traditions.

Waiting with bated (well ... ) breath,

Bob Bolton