G'day Allan,

Keep up the good work. It's great to have the full texts on these records - especially as I sometimes manage to get cassette copies of LPs I'm unlikely to ever find ... and there's never much beyond a title scrawled on the cassette cover!

Interesting to see that it was Martyn that started the much-repeated "furphy" about prog being a word invented, merely to maintain the rhyme. He obviously didn't bring an OED - or even a Shorter Oxford Dictionary in his swag ... and, being from the southern end of the Old Dart, didn't know much northern English. (I found myself, an Australian working on the Tasmanian and Snowy Mts Hydro Schemes in the '60s, having to "translate" between Poms from different ends of England!)

Anyway, prog is good old English word left by the Vikings in the Danelaw regions ... ~ 9th century north-east England ... a worn-down version of their word meaning forage or provender. It also occurs in The Bullockies' Ball, in the chorus:
"... Lots of prog and buckets of grog, to swig away at the bullockies' ball."

Since The Bullockies' Ball draws its tune and general shape from Finnegan's Wake, it may be that the word prog was still in use amongst the Irish, who lived a lot closer to Scandinavian sailors than Pommy landlubbers ... and the appearance of the word in a Kelly ballad seems to suggest the same.

Regards,

Bob Bolton