It was the unfortunate taking up of The Wild Rover by footie crowds that really settled its hash so far as the folk scene was concerned. It started of as quite a subtle song of Jack Ashore pretending to be down on his luck to test who his true friends were. The landlady who refused him credit {"such custom as yours I can get any day"},
soon changed her tune when "out of my pocket I pulled guineas bright, and the landlady's eyes opened up with delight. She said 'I have whisky and wines of the best, and the words that I spoke were only in jest'." Really quite a sad song, thematically related to Harry Cox's The Green Bed. But you'd never know that from hearing it roared out at Anfield or the Emirates, would you now?

≈M≈


sorry for drift -- not the song in the thread title; but the subject of this one emerged