Cecil Sharp's Note 40 (1916)

No. 40. Green Bushes

Other versions with tunes may be seen in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society (volume v, p. 177); Songs of the West (No. 43, 2d ed.); English County Songs (p. 170); and Traditional Tunes (p. 47). Two stanzas of this song were sung in Buckstone’s play, The Green Bushes (1845), and, owing to the popularity which this achieved, the complete song was shortly afterward published as a “popular Irish ballad sung by Mrs. FitzWilliam.” There are several Irish variants of this tune in the Petrie Collection (Nos. 222, 223, 368, 603, etc.), but none of these are downright Mixolydian tunes like the one in the text, which is the form in which the air is usually sung in England. Miss Broadwood and Miss Gilchrist, in notes appended to the version published in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society, consider that the words have been affected by those of a “Dialogue in imitation of Mr. H. Purcell—Between a Town Spark and a Country Lass,” 1740. It is difficult to say whether this be so or not, but I think that the phraseology of some of the lines in the text—which are also on broadsides by Disley and Such—shows distinct signs of “editing.” Mr. Baring-Gould pronounces the words as “substantially old,” “the softening down of an earlier ballad which has its analogue in Scotland,” and I suspect that this is the true explanation.