The Wild Rover: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

The Traditional Ballad Index dates "The Wild Rover" to a broadside printed before 1829 and records it in Britain, Ireland, Canada, the United States and Australia.[1] Its story is a simple one: a man who has thrown his money away on drink vows to give up the roving life.[1] A. L. Lloyd called it a street ballad reprinted many times by Catnach, Such and other printers of stall ballads, and the band Lankum traces it further back, to an older song by Thomas Lanfiere.[2] That older piece, "The Good-Fellow's Resolution," survives in the Roxburghe collection in a copy tentatively dated 1680, and its narrator likewise confesses to years of spending on drink and resolves to save his money.[3] Sources differ on its spirit: some singers stress its roots as a temperance song, while others treat it as a drinking song, and one pair of performers regards its origins as disputed.[2]

Etching of men drinking and smoking pipes around a table in a dim country inn

Adriaen van Ostade, Smokers at the Inn, etching, 17th century. Drinkers in a seventeenth-century inn, shown for the song's man who has spent his money on drink; the etching has no connection to the song.

Collectors found the song widely, with versions in the Greig-Duncan collection, Helen Creighton's Nova Scotia book and several Australian anthologies.[1] Lloyd learned a version in the Condobolin district in 1929 from a South Australian singer, recorded it in 1958, and remarked that it had "survived better in Australia than in the country of its origin."[2] In England, the Norfolk singer Sam Larner, who spent nearly half his life at sea, sang it on his 1961 Folkways album Now Is the Time for Fishing, recorded when he was 82.[4] The Dubliners learned the song from the Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger book The Singing Island, which printed Larner's version, and their 1964 single, a big hit, recast its sober message as a celebration of carousing; the Clancy Brothers were performing it in Belfast that same year.[2] The notes of the Joe Heaney Archives credit Ireland's ballad boom, and groups like the Dubliners and the Clancys, with making it widely popular.[5]

Bing Futch arranges it in DAD tuning for Mountain Dulcimer In The Band (Book 6 - Celtic), a J.O.B. Entertainment collection of sixteen Celtic songs and tunes that comes with two sets of recordings, one with Futch playing the dulcimer part over a backing track and one with the backing track alone.[6]

Our book that contains the song "The Wild Rover"

Sources

  1. Traditional Ballad Index: "Wild Rover No More".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "A.L. Lloyd: The Wild Rover".
  3. English Broadside Ballad Archive (UC Santa Barbara): "The Good-Fellow's Resolution" (EBBA 30668).
  4. Smithsonian Folkways: "Sam Larner, Now Is the Time for Fishing".
  5. The Joe Heaney Archives: "Wild Rover, The".
  6. Bing Futch: "Mountain Dulcimer In The Band (Book 6 - Celtic)".
  7. Image: Adriaen van Ostade, Smokers at the Inn, etching, 17th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

← Back to Browse By Song