Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads Project

Verses in Vogue with the Vulgar

William Riley: together with the Sailor boy

Also known as “The Trial of William Riley,” this late eighteenth-century “illegal courtship” text narrates the flight and capture of a wealthy Irish girl and her lover. He is cast into the “Sligo jail,” charged with theft of an heiress, and threatened with the noose. His love, named “Colinband” (“fair-haired girl”), defends him and convinces the judge that he is innocent. This is an early print of a song that was widely printed in the later nineteenth century and persisted in oral tradition (Laws M10; Creighton #74; Roud). It appeared in three songsters between 1798 and 1816 (R. Keller, Early American Songsters).

“The Sailor Boy” is described in the broadside Lord Cornwallis’s Surrender.

Additional Metadata

Date

1810-1814

Place of Publication

Boston.

Publisher

Coverly, Nathaniel, 1775?-1824, printer.

Subjects

Love
Crime
Trials
Sailors

First Line

Rise up William Riley, and come along with me.
Sea was calm, the sky serene.

Identifiers

BIB ID: 290159
OCLC Control No.: (OCoLC)ocm04737120
OCLC Control No.: (OCoLC)ocn191471787
Ford, W.C. Thomas ballads, 291
AAS General Catalog URL: http://catalog.mwa.org/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=290159
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Physical Dimensions

30 x 24 cm.

Transcriptions

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Citation

“William Riley: together with the Sailor boy,” Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads Project, accessed October 22, 2026, https://collections.americanantiquarian.org/thomasballads/items/show/254.