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OK, so this thread is almost 14 years old... with the last entry coming up on 12 years old. Never having heard any of this before, I'm interested anyway (many of my relatives are or were musicians - both parents and one grandfather were actually music teachers). I just heard a version of ''Uncle Rat'' (by Danú or Altan; not sure which) on WKSU radio's 'Folk Alley' here in northeastern Ohio, couldn't understand the lyrics, looked 'em up and eventually ended up here.

All of the above is interesting and seems very well researched. Listening to the song's ''Kitty alone, kitty alone'' lyric, I thought they were saying, ''Get thee along, get thee along''. In this case ''Get thee along and I '' would suggest, 'On your way and me as well'.

Any possibility that the portions of these songs in question started out as such and were just mistranslated by generations of folk singers picking up the variations solely by oral tradition? 'Puddy alone' makes sense in the above examples, but 'Kitty alone' does not.

~Scott from Ohio

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