This comic song, “Description of a Wonderful Old Man,” had a spate of popularity in the early 1770s in colonial America, appearing in newspapers in Boston, Hartford, and Charleston (Corry). A sheet music edition was released in London around 1775 as A Wonderful New Ballad of a Wonderful Old Man. Isaiah Thomas published the text at the back of his children’s book The Exhibition of Tom Thumb in 1787 (56-60). Here Thomas includes a burden of “derry down, &c.,” perhaps a suggestion that the final two measures be repeated as a chorus with that text. However, none of the other sources of this song suggest this addition. The music as printed in Convivial Songster and in Select Songster does not hint of a chorus or of any relationship with the “derry down” tune (see The Times). The text appeared in eight songsters between 1786 and 1812 (R. Keller, Early American Songsters).
In “An Irish Song,” Morah (sometimes Murrough) O’Monaghan is a crippled seaman, homeless and resorting to begging beside the road in Dublin. A passerby reminds him that if he had enlisted in the army, he would be on half-pay now. Sailors did not receive wages but rather a share of the prizes the crew was able to capture. Morah’s share apparently was nothing but injuries. Morah simply accepts his problems and drinks them away. Credited to George Saville Carey (1743-1807) in the Universal Songster, the indicated tune on the broadside is the Scots-Irish “Humours of Glen” (3:19). The tune was well known at the time. It had been used in The Poor Soldier (1783) and was copied by many tune book compilers (Wells 504-6; R. Keller; Fleischmann, Sources #1673). A fiercely pro-war song by John McCreery to the same tune was published in the Boston Independent Chronicle on February 15, 1814, reprinted “from the Petersburgh [VA] Intelligencer.”
Also shown here is the bottom half of Made on Ebenezer Ball. Using the sheet as waste, Coverly ignored the text and printed a proof of Description of a Wonderful Old Man on the back. A complete copy is at the Library of Congress. Deputy John Tileston Downes was one of the earliest law enforcement casualties in the line of duty in the state of Maine, shot as he approached the house of a suspected counterfeiter (“Fallen Officers”). A narrative of Ebenezer Ball’s trial was published after his hanging on October 31, 1811, and announced for sale in the Castine (ME) Eagle on November 7. A full description of the execution was printed in the same issue. A long clerical narrative in blank verse was printed on a broadside by A. H. Holland in Buckstown, Maine, with a simpler cut also depicting the hanging. The Holland picture may reflect the actual scene better than the illustration here, which had been recycled from an earlier triple hanging scene. The Trial of Ebenezer Ball was also published in pamphlet form in Castine in 1811. The Holland broadside is titled Lines on the Death of Ebenezer Ball (1811). Another edition is in the Maine State Library with a biographical sketch of Ball.
