Cecil Sharp's Note 45 (1916)

No. 45. The Saucy Sailor

Other versions with tunes are published in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society (volume v, pp. 343–345); Tozer’s Sailors’ Songs (No. 39); Barrett’s English Folk Songs (No. 32); Songs of the West (No. 21); and English Folk Songs for Schools (No. 37).

Dr. Barrett, in a footnote, says that the song was a great favorite with factory girls in the East End of London, where, I am told, it is still to be heard.

That printed in English Folk Songs for Schools is undoubtedly the normal form of the tune, which is always in the major, or Mixolydian, mode. The mode in which the air given in the text is cast is the Æolian with a sharpened third, the only instance of this irregular scale that I have ever come across—probably the unconscious invention of the singer who gave me the song. The tune is a variant of the air traditionally associated with “Chevy Chase” (see Northumbrian Minstrelsy, p. 3, and Traditional Tunes, p. 19). Chappell mates the tune to “The Children in the Wood,” but states that it was known to be one of the “Chevy Chase” airs.