Old Brown's Daughter

DESCRIPTION: "There lives an ancient party At the other end of town, He keeps a llittle chandler's shop, His ancient name is Brown." The singer admires his daughter and wishes he were Brown's son-in-law. Brown demands a lord. He hopes to run for parliament to win her
AUTHOR: G. W. Hunt? (1839-1904)
EARLIEST DATE: before 1900 (Bodleian broadside Firth c.26(310)); Guigné-ForgottenSongsOfTheNewfoundlandOutports says it was written in the early 1870s
KEYWORDS: love courting humorous nobility
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (4 citations):
ADDITIONAL: Johnny Burke, _Burke's Christmas Songster 1926_, self-published, 1926 (PDF copy avallable on the Memorial University of Newfoundland web site), [no page number], "Old Brown's Daughter" (1 text, slightly adapted to Newfoundland)
Johnny Burke (John White, Editor), _Burke's Ballads_, no printer listed, n.d. (PDF available on Memorial University of Newfoundland web site), p. 6, "Old Brown's Daughter" (1 text)
Johnny Burke (William J. Kirwin, editor), _John White's Collection of Johnny Burke Songs_, Harry Cuff Publications, St. John's, 1981, #54, p. 86, "Old Brown's Daughter" (1 text)
Anna Kearney Guigné-ForgottenSongsOfTheNewfoundlandOutports, "'Old Brown's Daughter': Re-contextualizing a 'Locally' Compose Newfoundland Folk Song" -- essay found in David Atkinson and Steve Roud, Editors, _Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America: The Interface between Print and Oral Tradition_, Ashgate, 2014, pp. 245-262 (1 text, on pp. 250-251, with excerpts from other versions and a sheet music cover)
Roud #1426
BROADSIDES:
Bodleian, Firth c.26(310), "Old Brown's Daughter," T. Pearson (Manchester), 1850-1899
NOTES [179 words]: The article by Guigné cited in the ADDITIONAL references discusses how this went from being a popular song to being regarded as a local song in Newfoundland. Probably written by G. W. Hunt (whose only other song in the Index, as of this writing, is "Sarah's Young Man"), it was certainly popularized by Alfred Glenville Vance, "the Great Vance," who brought the song to the music halls in 1871. It reportedly occurred in a Poet's Box broadside in 1872.
So how did it end up in Newfoundland? Johnny Burke (1851-1930) almost certainly had a part in this (the song was rewritten for Newfoundland conditions, and Burke is a likely candidate for the man who rewrote it, and as the references show, he put it in many of his songbooks). As a result, he seems to have been regarded as the composer in Newfoundland. Indeed, based on dates, it is possible that he wrote the original and Hunt stole it from him. But Hunt of course established himself as a performer much earlier, and the British version about running for parliament makes more sense than the Newfoundland variation. - RBW
Last updated in version 5.1
File: JBX2601

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