My Bonnie

My Bonnie lies over the ocean” is a traditional Scottish folk song that remains popular in Western culture.  Although the song’s origin is uncertain, its original subject could possibly be Charles Edward Stuart (‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’)  after the defeat of the Prince at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 and his subsequent exile, his Jacobite supporters could have sung this song or one like it in his honor; and thanks to the ambiguity of the term “Bonnie”, which can refer to a woman as well as to a man, they could pretend it was a love song.  The English traditional singing group The Watersons, on their 1975 album “For Pence and Spicy Ale” sing a song from the English tradition called “My Barney Lies over the Ocean” which has a slightly different melody and is said to be an antecedent. In the liner notes for the song, the musicologist A. L. Lloyd says about “My Barney”: “A stage song favoured by Irish comedians from the 1860s on. During the 1880s, apparently on American university campuses, close harmony groups remade it into the better-known—and even more preposterous—’My Bonny Lies over the Ocean’. Watersons had this from Bob Davenport who learnt it from a Frank Quinn 78.In 1881, under the duo of pseudonyms H.J. Fuller and J.T. Wood.