The Penguin version of "The Streams of Lovely Nancy" is a composite text. There are in fact either two quite distinct versions of a single song here, or arguably two related songs. One of these is "The Streams of Lovely Nancy" proper; it has several reagional forms in England, one in Ireland ("The Strands of Magilligan"), and one in Newfoundland.

The other is "Come All You Little Streamers," known in England only from Sussex and neighboring Hampshire, with a distinctive variant tradition, "The Green Mountain," attested only from North America.

The only common element between "The Streams of Lovely Nancy" on the one hand and "Come All You Little Streamers"/"The Green Mountain" on the other is the stanza about the castle. (Well, there is also a stanza borrowed from "The Manchester Angel" that turns up in both "The Streams of Lovely Nancy,"--which in various versions may incorporate any of four stanzas from "The Manchester Angel"--and in "The Green Mountain.")

These two have been treated as a single song since the days of Lucy Broadwood and Anne Gilchrist, and continue to be so regarded down to the present. The Penguin version is the first, I think, to conflate them.

Sam Henry's text is from an unidentified singer, all right, but was pretty obviously revised under the influence of Sabine Baring-Gould's version in _Songs of the West_ and in the Castle stanza of versions of "Come All You Little Streamers" published in JEFDSS. And Baring-Gould's version itself was revised from the oral texts. So neither the Penguin version nor that of Sam Henry, or for that matter that of Baring-Gould, should be taken as directly representing the oral tradition of the song. (This is a historical issue, and does not imply anything wrong with them esthetically.)

The history of the song is in fact very intricate. It is considerably older than the earliest published versions (ca. 1800); it is universally agreed to be of English, likely Cornish, origin, but must have arrived in Ireland in the eighteenth century, not long after the corpus of English-language Irish songs began to be formed. And there is some indication in material that looks to me as though it has been borrowed from "Streams of Lovely Nancy" resp. "Green Mountain"/"Little Streamer" that it *may* have been once part of longer song incorporating both of the above.

Stephen R.