I've loved this song since I first fell in love with every song on Judy Collins "In My Life" album & Liverpool Lullaby and Crow on the Cradle have both been in my repertoire since the early 1970s, when I had a copy of the Judy Collins Song Book that contained both. It's one of the first two songs I was solidly able to perform with autoharp.

In the US, the lyrics sometimes get warped by saying "when little ones provide the cash"- making it sound like child labor was going to fund having a bash! (Because this is how it appears in "Rise up Singing" where they made sure they had the copyright permission, while failing to get the correct chords on songs outside public domain /end rant) The simple explanation in Collins' book saying "Littlewoods is a lottery..." isn't much to have to explain, as I do when I sing it in public. Judy Collins' smoothing out the dialect is something I wasn't even aware of, though I always though it should be "get a belt from yer da" Even as a young teen, I was able to catch the nuance of the kind of parental threat that this was- I didn't expect that Child Protective Services would have to be called.

I've always wondered about Stan Kelly and if there were other songs with this much impact that he'd written, so I'm much pleased to see this thread.

Joanne in Cleveland (aka Siberia on the Heights)