G'day Don,

I remember a master class presented by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger ... Ewan suggested that you had to think hard about who you are when you sing a song. You can be anyone involved with the song - but you have to know who, to decide how you will sing it. John McDermott knows how he thinks of the song, not how Fred Weatherly did ... and it works for him.

Of course, Weatherly had several more recent (British)wars to think of ... most recently the Boer War and the Sudan about 15 years before that. By 1910 he would have had intimations of the "Great War" looming - these things don't happen because some nutter throws a bomb or shoots a minor royal in the Balkans ... that is just a triggering event.

Anyway, a close look at some of the songs set to The Air from Londonderry over the preceding 5 decades or so suggests that Weatherly was not above recycling someone else's good lines.

Regards,

Bob Bolton (who avoids the sort of places where one could find oneself singing this)