Just like the burlesqued ballads the comic vernacular songs soon found their way into the oral tradition. William and Dinah was soon supplanted in oral tradition by Villikins, its Music Hall burlesque written by Henry Mayhew. Comic burlesques of ballads like 'Billy Taylor', 'Lord Lovel', 'George Collins' and 'Ah, my Love's Dead' quickly became serious songs again when they re-entered the oral tradition. The comic pathos imbued in the stage versions was very weak and often not obvious on the printed broadside and the rural poor accepted them as serious songs. Indeed even the middle-class collectors recorded them as serious songs. They often collected and published 1860s Music hall songs without knowing what they were. 'Country Carrier, Jim the Carter Lad, Watercresses, When Johnny Comes Marching Home, Cruise of the Calabar etc....