The Well-Travelled 'Wild Rover'

'The Wild Rover', a song widely known amongst the general public and commonly believed to be Irish, has its origin in a seventeenth-century English broadside written by Thomas Lanfiere, one of a class of moralizing 'alehouse ballads' of the period. This evolved into several distinct printed texts, which passed into oral tradition in England, Scotland, Ireland, and North America, while the song also achieved significant popularity in Australia. The version familiar today is the result of further adaptation by performers in the 1960s folk revival. Over the course of three hundred years, several distinct textual and musical changes have altered the moral thrust of the song and assisted its enduring popularity.