War Correspondent, The

DESCRIPTION: "You've all heard of 'Banjo' Paterson and of course I needn't say That he's the best and the greatest correspondent of the day...." The singer, alleged to be Paterson, boasts of all the people he knows and of his great journalistic skills
AUTHOR: Original version by Charles Osborne
EARLIEST DATE: 1901 (original version); for the Australian version, 1968 (Meredith/Anderson-FolkSongsOfAustralia)
KEYWORDS: bragging humorous
FOUND IN: Australia
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Meredith/Anderson-FolkSongsOfAustralia, pp. 274-275, "The War Correspondent" (1 text, 1 tune)
Meredith/Tritton-DukeOfTheOutback, pp. 88089, "The War Correspondent" (1 text, 1 tune)
FolkSongAndMusicHall, "The War Correspondent"
Roud #29039
NOTES [119 words]: Meredith and Anderson's informant, "Duke" Tritton, was of the opinion that Banjo Paterson wrote this piece as a parody of his exploits (Paterson was a war correspondent during the Boer War). Given Paterson's observed behavior, however, this seems unlikely.
It appeats that the Paterson version is a modification of a 1900 music hall song, "The War Correspondent," by Charles Osborne, which is a joke about a Boer War correspondent. In that song, the correspondent is not Paterson but "Brimstone Chapel," which FolkSongAndMusicHall explains was a (minimally) veiled reference to Winston Churchill. That version apparently didn't go into tradition, but it was easy to transfer to that other correspondent, Paterson. - RBW
Last updated in version 7.0
File: MA274

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