The original tune to the original song was 'Oh bury me out on the Prairie (The Cowboy's Lament)' 1927, by Travis Hale, Dean Fitzer & Prescott Brown. It had its own original tune and some of the many parodies followed that tune for the next decade, but by WWII some parodies had adapted it to the better-known 'Red River Valley' so that by the end of the war this had become the more prevalent tune. There are forces versions from all of the WWII settings, Burma, North Africa etc., and one version we have is of a dying trawlerman off the Russian coast having been shot by a Gerry gun. The Burma version we have uses the original tune.

It would go quite nicely to 'Nobody's Darling' though.