Teague's ramble to the camp

“Teague’s Ramble to the Camp,” full of contradictions, presages such later classics as Stephen Foster’s “Oh Susanna” (1847). It is also known as “Teague’s Ramble to Hyde Park.” A “second part” appeared in the 1790s titled “Teague’s Resolution to Go to Flanders” and a later reworking of the song was “Nottingham Fair” or “Nottamun Town.” The text is modeled on a song from Queen Anne’s time beginning “Dear Catholick Brother, are you come from the Wars,” a five-verse lyric with a few contradictions and a chorus line “with a fa la, la” that is lost in the later song.

Evidently quite popular, the song was parodied in a number of ballad operas in the 1720s and 1730s, and appeared in sheet music as well (Roud; Simpson 166-68; Fleischmann, Sources #312; Moss 325-28; R. Keller, Early American Songsters). This text may be a folk extension of the earlier idea as it does not appear to have other traces in the eighteenth century. While there are a few Irish expressions in the lyrics, the song appears to be of English origin, perhaps a satire on the Irish “bumpkin.”

The long-lived “Ally Croker” was printed in a sheet music issue around 1730 (Schnapper 1003). In 1753 Samuel Foote used the song in An Englishman in Paris, changing the title to “Ally Croaker” and revising the text a little. According to Bruce Olson, “Shortly after Foote’s version appeared, it was reprinted as a ‘new song’ in the Universal Magazine (1753), which wasn’t true, and its tune soon appeared as that for a country dance in the Universal Magazine of April 1754 and in Rutherford’s Choice Collection of 60 Country Dances.”[1] After 1754, while the tune or reference to it appeared in sheet music, song collections, and manuscript tune books well into the nineteenth century, appearing in four songsters between 1760 and 1817, the original lyric seems to have circulated orally. Parodies appear in several songsters and the burden “Will you marry me, dear Ally, Ally Croker?” appears in at least two publications (R. Keller, Early American Secular Music and Its European Sources; Roud; A. Opie; Colman, Jealous Wife 67).