Old Billy Riley
(Billy Riley)
A. L. Lloyd on Blow Boys Blow
John Short's version
Source: John Short of Watchet, English Folk-Chanteys (1914)
Sharp prints the later verses as single lines. Terry, who had the song from the same singer, marks each one to be sung twice.
Old Billy Riley is a halyard shanty with a single solo line and the refrain “Old Billy Riley O!” A. L. Lloyd called it “a fierce song, made to fit the rhythm of fast pulling and quick breathing.”
Cecil Sharp first printed it in English Folk-Chanteys (1914), from John Short of Watchet, and knew of no other version. Richard Runciman Terry also had it from Short, for The Shanty Book (1926), and found no other sailor who knew it. Short’s verses simply name Mister, Missus and Miss Riley.
Cicely Fox Smith printed a different version in A Book of Shanties (1927), saying it “was sung in Green’s ‘Blackwall’ in the eighteen-fifties” (that is, aboard the Blackwall frigates of R. & H. Green, the London shipowners) and that few younger sailors had heard it. In it Riley is a dancing master and master of a drogher, a West Indian sugar trader, bound for Antigua. Stan Hugill noted its resemblance to Tiddy I O and thought it began as a cotton-hoosiers’ song. Lloyd thought the West Indies more likely.
Lloyd recorded it with Ewan MacColl on Blow Boys Blow (1957), using Fox Smith’s verses and adding a few about Riley’s daughter.
No relation to the disgraced Fox political commentator.