#913. Lineage of Song: “Bully Boys”

As sung in Robin Hood

Alan Doyle performs it live

Colm McGuinness

Random folk version

I’ve blogged about this phenomenon before, but it still fascinates me and has actually gotten bigger since then…

This time I’ll go a little deeper. Let’s rewind to Russell Crowe in the ‘80s, when you had to be Australian to know he existed. At this point he really was making his name as a pop act. The song most relevant to later eras would be “I Just Wanna Be Like Marlon Brando.” Eventually he did in fact become an acting icon.

But he never left his interest in music behind. He ended up making friends with Alan Doyle of the Newfoundland folk band Great Big Sea, and they made music together and Doyle showed up in a number of Crowe’s movies. (Their biggest musical collaboration would be “Testify,” a song so good I still swear it can’t possibly originate with them or is a testament to just how good Crowe really is.) Doyle’s biggest role was as Alan-a-Dale in Robin Hood. When you cast an authentic musician in the role who regularly performs folk music and composes original material, the likelihood of something great resulting increases. He cobbled together a tune that’s half in the background of one scene, forgot about it, and a few years later was made aware that folk acts had claimed it and made it their own, finishing it out however they felt like, and the music scene began crediting it as another folk traditional from some point long in the past, original composer “unknown.”

So he finished it out himself and released it on an album. In recent years, after acts like Mumford & Sons made it briefly seem folk music would explode again in all the ways fans still lament Bob Dylan abandoning in Newport, there’s once again been a resurgence. Nathan Evans went viral with “Wellerman,” a traditional sea shanty, and on the album he subsequently got to make he included a cover of Doyle’s “Bully Boys.” Colm McGuinness has a video where he accompanies himself brilliantly, and that’s become a favorite of mine…

It’s strange how these things turn out. When I started this series I didn’t immediately think to include “Bully Boys,” since I’d covered it before (heh), but it would be woefully incomplete without it. Anyone can look up traditional songs that trace back centuries. This is one that played out over very recent history in the most unlikely ways. It will probably never top any charts, but has woven its way deeply across the English speaking landscape (and for all I know, elsewhere). This is the kind of thing that fascinates me.