Annotation:All 'Round My Hat (1)
X:1 T:All around my hat M:C L:1/8 S:Joyce - Old Irish Folk Music and Songs (1909) Z:AK/Fiddler's Companion K:G Dorian G2 AF G2 f>e|d2 c>A G>F D2|G2 A>F G2 Bc|dcBc d2 d>e|fedc f2 A>G| GBAG G>F D>E|FEFG F>G A/=B/c|d2 c>A G3z||
ALL 'ROUND MY HAT [1]. AKA and see "Come Along with Me (1)," "Green Willow." English, Irish; Air (whole time). G Dorian. Standard tuning (fiddle). One part. The song, probably English in origin and (according to Peter Kennedy) is "Perhaps one of the most popular of all English love songs." It was "a Cockney parody that proved very popular from the 1820's onward and spawned many versions; the one popular in Ireland, where the hat is adorned with a tri-coloured ribbon, is a later adaptation by Peadar Kearney, referring to the Easter Rising of 1916", notes Paul de Grae[1]. Fleetwood Sheppard remarks:
This song is given from my own recollection of it sixty years ago, when it was more than popular; it was the delight -the ecstasy of the London street-boy. I doubt if it ever penetrated far into the country, its vulgarity was too essentially metropolitan. The hero was a costermonger, his fair love was a pick-pocket, transported for theft. I have modified two or three of the original verses. There was no real humour in them, and the London dialect of that day is a thing of the past. It was the charming air which gave popularity to the song. Chappell supplies the original form, and says it is a Somersetshire tune. No doubt he is right, but he has no name for it other than "The original of All Around My Hat". I think there is no doubt it was a dance-tune, but the first strain is omitted from the song."[2].
With the title "Green Willow," the tune is used for an English country dance, fashioned in 1932.
The tune is sometimes associated (by Kennedy, for example) with the song air "Budgeon it is a Delicate Trade (The)," after a citation by 19th century antiquarian and musicologist William Chappell, but 'Budgeon' is a different melody and in the Lydian mode, though it is conceivable that they derived from a common ancestor. The song has also been associated with "The Nobleman's Wedding," which has a similar verse and a more-or-less related melody; one may have borrowed from the other.
All round my hat I will wear the green willow:
All round my hat for a twelvemonth and a day;
And if anyone should ask me the reason that I wear it,
I'll tell him that my true-love is gone far away......[P.W. Joyce].
