My Bonny Lies Over The Ocean: A Song History
"My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" is a lament for a sweetheart across the sea, in which the singer begs the winds to bring the loved one home.[1] It is often called Scottish, and one theory holds that the absent "Bonnie" was originally Charles Edward Stuart, exiled after the Jacobite defeat at Culloden in 1746, with his supporters singing of him under cover of a love song.[2] None of the sources consulted here offers early evidence for this, however, and the folk-song site Mainly Norfolk thinks the Bonnie Prince Charlie link is probably "a red herring."[3]
Fitz Henry Lane, The Golden State Entering New York Harbor, oil on canvas, 1854. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
The earliest printing listed in the Traditional Ballad Index is in Hills's Student Songs of 1881.[1] Sheet music titled "Bring Back My Bonnie to Me" appeared in the early 1880s, but its authorship is unsettled. One account names Charles E. Pratt, writing as "H. J. Fuller" and "J. T. Wood."[3] The Ballad Index, drawing on the research of Fuld, notes an 1882 printing crediting "H. J. Fulmer" as Pratt, reports Fuld's suspicion that Pratt did no more than adapt the song, and raises the possibility that a real Howard Jones Fuller was behind it.[1] Several researchers trace it to an older stage song about an absent Johnny or Barney, which Mainly Norfolk credits to the music-hall writer Harry Clifton around 1860, though Ewan MacColl allowed that the borrowing might have run the other way.[1][3] A. L. Lloyd thought it took its familiar form among close-harmony singers at American colleges in the 1880s.[3]
From there it passed into camp, Scout and sing-along songbooks, and its tune carried a long string of parodies, including several soldiers' and airmen's songs.[1] In June 1961 the singer Tony Sheridan recorded a rock-and-roll arrangement in Hamburg, with the young Beatles behind him, at a session set up by the Polydor agent Bert Kaempfert; the single came out that October under the name Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers.[4]
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