gillymor,

I was thinking about the tune that The Pogues call The Kerry Polka.

(As an aside, I had a friend, now sadly deceased, who was a blues man and not an Irish music fan. He was always very funny, and he called the Irish tunes "diddly dum diddly" music because it all sounded the same to him. If I wondered aloud about the name of a tune people were playing in a session he'd just say it was called Diddly Dum Diddly.)

So, the one that The Pogues called The Kerry Polka definitely sounds like the STUTR/W and for whatever reason, they called it a different name.

I just found this and it appears to be the same tune:

The Ballydesmond (#3) polka on The Session

The last comment on the page is:

"Ballydesmond #3

Kerry Polka, see https://thesession.org/tunes/1410 "

I have also been thinking about the folk tradition in pre-electronic technology times. It was a process of hearing and learning tunes from others and then the tunes spread around the country, then around the world and the tunes could change, the names could change, but the variations originated as one tune.

In the Australian folk tradition there is a huge Irish influence, starting with the Irish people transported out here as convicts. It's a big country out here especially when you think of it with no communications technologies to record or transmit the tunes. A musician would maybe hear a tune once or twice and then learn to play it, maybe not playing it exactly the same, and then it's like Chinese Whispers. It subtly changes as each musician hears it differently or remembers it differently, or puts his/her own spin on it.

The book which started me on my love of folk music and I used to borrow it from the library when I was in early high school, is called: Folk Songs of Australia, and the Men and Women Who Sang Them, by John Meredith and Hugh Anderson, published in 1967 by Ure Smith.

Meredith and Anderson collected the songs and tunes from traditional players around the country, and made comments on the tunes, including notes about variations in versions played by different people.

So, Kerry Polka, Salmon Tails Up the River/Water, Ballydesmond #3. Same tune, different names, I guess.