A friend has written a piece for my site
Salut! Live about the song Geordie Black, composed by a Tyneside singer/songwriter/poet, Rowland “Rowley” Harrison, around 1870. He cannot find a tune for it other than the one Dave Swarbrick and Ian Campbell came up with for a 1965 album after
they too, searched in vain for the original melody. A reader, Dave Sutherland, says he uses one he learnt from the work of the Elliotts of Birtley but assume it is the same as that of the Ian Campbell Folk group and later versions. It seems odd that the original should have vanished altogether. Does anyone in the often scholarly Mudcat family have any light to shed?