Steve, it sounds like you are familiar with "Folk Songs of the Catskills" Cazden et al. pg. 136 - 139:

"But reaching beyond the influence of such publications have been the numerous comic parodies of Lord Lovell. Barry notes the earliest among them to have been sung in 1836 by comedian James Howard of Niblo's Garden (Hadaway). Every-body's Songster in 1839 included another, sung by Thomas Hadaway himself, called Sukey Soapsuds. A sheet music publication of 1844, issued in Edinburgh by Wood and Co., contained The Pathetic Historie of Lord Lovell and Nancy Bell, as sung by Sam Cowell, who made it a spectacular success. Barry further mentions the 1857 sheet music issued in Boston by Oliver Ditson, listed also thus by Dichter, with the title The Celebrated Lord Lovel and Lady Nancy Bell, Comic Ballad, arranged by J.C.J. Finally, Barry notes the Joe Muggins treatment, which may be termed a parody of the parody.

Sam Cowell's comic parody of Lord Lovell was published twice, no later than 1855, in the Musical Bouquet series of London sheet-music issues. The earlier copy (#789) contains spoken interludes, as well as the comic ballad form proper. Information on the song copy (#857) states that both the comicked Lord Lovel and the even more famous Vilikens and his Dinah were sung in Sam Cowell's music hall show called The Ratcatcher's Daughter. One of the many instrumental medleys in which the tune of Lord Lovel appears, also published in the Musical Bouquet series (#787), was arranged by J. Harroway, and called Sam Cowell's Comic Quadrille.

All three copies show the same splendid color engraving on their covers. It depicts Sam Cowell, dressed in the character of Lord Lovell. He wears a formal morning suit, complete with top hat, but his trouser cuffs are turned up as though for wading a muddy stretch. Over one shoulder he carries a travel pack. His theatrically woebegone expression is shown full face, gleaming eyes peering from beneath exaggerated beetle brows.

Variant as well as newly improvised wordings were sure to develop during later performances of such a music-hall success, and some of them were incorporated into their published prints. Cowell's text, as it appeared in Davidson's folio of 1861, contains the slightly altered line:

All true-loviers to admire –rire-rire

Which draws hilarity from the ballad conceit of repeating syllables, such as in truth arises rather from musical structures when these are applied relentlessly to texts that will not support them…??

In H.M.S. Pinafore, verse 8 of Lord Lovell in the Davidson's Musical Library folio reads:

Then he flung himself down by the side of the corpse
With a shivering gulp and a guggle
Gave two hops, three kicks, heav'd a sigh, blew his nose
Sung a stave, and then died in the struggle–uggle-uggle,
Sung a stave, and then died in the struggle.

Cowell's parody form continued to be reprinted in London during the 1860's in Charles Sheard's Great Comic Volume, and in 1876 in D'Alcorn's Musical Miracles.

According to Barry, the Joe Muggins parody text was also introduced by Sam Cowell in the period about 1850. In an 1869 parody by E.F. Dixey, Lord Lovell is left not only with a broken heart but with broken kneecaps, the result of his smashing into a post while riding his velocipede.

Besides both a serious and comic text of Lord Lovel, the Edwin Ford Piper Collection contains a Civil War parody called A New Ballad of Lord Lovell, the brave defender of New Orleans. The item is mentioned by John Harrington Cox, and fragments of other texts are given by Horace M. Belden. Four stanzas have been recorded by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger (ZDA 70). In this New Ballad parody, the original…

…narrative has dropped out, but the tune and the familiar pattern remain, to produce an ending with telling reference. This Lord Lovel was a "rebel swell," who "sat in St. Charles hotel," a-waving his sword on high:

He swore by the black and he swore by the blue
He swore by the stars and the bars
He would never fly from a Yankee crew
While he was a son of Mars, Mars, Mars
While he was a son of Mars

Inevitably, the dénouement to so swaggering an opening was that the hero and his 50,000 men fled, without firing a shot, at the first sighting of Farragut's fleet. But in faithful ballad fashion, the fateful end is satirized with an additional fillip:

When Lord Lovell's life was brought to a close
By a sharp shooting Yankee gunner
From his head there sprouted a red, red rose
From his heels a scarlet runner, runner, runner
From his heels a scarlet runner

Except for Barry, ballad scholars unfortunately appear either to have been oblivious to, or disdainful of, the documented history of these distinctly comic forms of Lord Lovell, while they have seemed hesitant as well to recognize the implications of their music-hall origins. Sandy Paton states (FSA 36F) that Child himself had a comic text, but would not print it with the others. At least nine of the versions compiled by Bertrand Bronson may be identified as comic treatments. Bronson does not single them out or mark them so, and while he does acknowledge that some humorous texts are known, he seems not to sense either that their humor is satirical or that it is stagey. Instead, he thinks of them as children's treatments or "nursery degenerations": "The high seriousness of the parents is the children's favorite joke." The obtuseness of ballad scholars in this regard must be appreciated as a very difficult feat, since the material available to them is hard to pass by without notice. Diversion of the humorous aspects onto this tack means overlooking their theatre-piece beginnings, and it means also ignoring their service as symptoms of the necessary wide previous audience acquaintance with the "straight" versions, such as satire requires.

Tristram P. Coffin mentions "burlesques" of the ballad, and to account for them, he finds no better explanation than a vaguely humorous inclination, somehow implicit in its tune. To this effect he quotes Arthur Kyle Davis, who in truth hardly qualifies as an expert on such musical subtleties: "The melodies are too light for the story and mitigate the tragedy. For this reason, the song has often been subject to parody." Reed Smith also, while otherwise taking note of five printings of the ballad in American songsters between 1836 and 1865, infers nothing from them as evidence of comic theatre forms, but attributes the comic effect to a "lilting tune." So speculative a "reason" becomes less persuasive as we observe that, while most known versions of both the serious and the comic text forms of Lord Lovell have been sung to the tune strain found in #33, which by this definition is "too light" to support a serious text, the identical "light" tune strain is found in use also for numerous versions of Child # 4 Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight; for one version of Child #25, Willie's Lyke-Wake (Greig); and for many versions of Child 73 Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor. For none of these have comic parodies appeared such as would supposedly have been induced by the tune.

Conversely, such "reasoning" or rationalization likewise cannot account for comic parodies of other ballads not known to have been afflicted with "light" tunes. Thus Davidson's Musical Library (ix 1862) contains a "comicked" treatment of Child 84, Barbara Allen, showing the ready application of the practice to "serious" sentimental themes. The common Billy McGee Magar form of Child 26, The Three Ravens (see notes to #99) is another for which neither the oldest nor the most familiar tune strains suggest "lightness."

Apart from the facile pitfall of attributing to a musical tune the verbal meanings and connotations of its associated text, we might do better to adduce rather a contrary principle – namely, that for successful parody, an obvious conflict between tune character and text is eminently desirable. For example, the rather lugubrious minor tune sung by Comical Brown for Billy Vite and Nelly Green helps to emphasize its satire of #66, The Arsenic Tragedy. The slow and mournful manner, in which Marvin Yale sang #142, Missie Mouse, made the ordinarily bouncy tune hilariously funny. It would be fair to say that the speculations of even the most reputable ballad scholars on musical matters, when they are not infused with the needed musical insights, may at times prove nothing short of childish.

Yet the approach they have taken reflects less an academic obtuseness on their part than a underestimation and a misapprehension of the role played by touring theatrical performers in developing and disseminating what later came to be idealized as an archaic oral tradition, romantically immune to such contamination. Instead, the notable uniformity among numerous collected versions of a ballad ought to have alerted students at once to the probability that organized means of mass distribution must have been responsible, rather than the localized, spontaneous, slow, and sporadic process of oral tradition.

Particularly is this evident with regard to ballad and song tunes. For wherever a tune can be located for any of the comic parodies of Lord Lovell, it always belongs to the same tune strain. Barry's designation of this tune as the "vulgate" form is confirmed by the additional examples we have noted, and by the tune of #33. How much this kind of musical uniformity may result in part from the many publications containing the notated music has often escaped consideration; it has been assumed that "the folk" is, by definition, musically illiterate.

George Davidson's Modern Song Book of 1854 contains no tunes. But included with its text (275-76) of Child 275, Get Up and Bar the Door, is a dutiful notice, "music at Duff & Hodgson's." Not only does that imply that the ballad must have been receiving popular notice and acclaim in the music hall sufficient to support the hope of selling the printed copies at a profit; it also implies that word-of- mouth tradition alone may not at all account for the numerous similar versions of the ballad "recovered" at a later date.

A further way in which tunes become familiar is their adaption for dancing. It was common practice, during the heyday of Lord Lovell as a stage hit, to use the latest music-hall numbers in the ballroom. The Musical Bouquet published the tune as part of three quadrilles and in three other instrumental medleys. The rival Musical Treasury in the same period was content with a single waltz adaptation. Other instrumental dance treatments were published during the 1860's by Boosey and Co., by William Chappell and B. Mackenzie in London, and by Elias Howe in Boston. Boosey's Musical Cabinet #5 contains Lord Lovell's Waltz, a salon piece for piano by Henri Laurent."