The link I provided gives "Flashes of Merriment" as a source, and according to the BL catalogue a book of "humorous fireworks" (by Jeremy Squib, Engineer) was published under that name around 1770. But is that too early for a song that contains lines such as
I started by trying to check the dates for "A Lord of Steam and Iron (The Monster Science)," which is the other ridiculously steampunky folksong I know; unfortunately, while everyone seems to agree that it appeared first as a poem in The Potter's Examiner, nobody seems to know when. (The 1830's is the earliest reasonable estimate according to Mudcat.) Throwing "The Cork Leg" into Google Books was marginally more helpful, in that it tells me the song was alluded to in print in 1838 (The Gentleman's Magazine), collected as early as 1853 (Davidson's Universal Melodist), and that Henry Clay Barnabee (publishing his memoirs in 1913) is very proud that his definitive performance of the ballad was appreciated by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I suppose the question is whether there was an earlier, perhaps less mechanically wacky version of the same name. I can't find anything resembling a first-run broadside or sheet music.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-13 05:10 pm (UTC)I started by trying to check the dates for "A Lord of Steam and Iron (The Monster Science)," which is the other ridiculously steampunky folksong I know; unfortunately, while everyone seems to agree that it appeared first as a poem in The Potter's Examiner, nobody seems to know when. (The 1830's is the earliest reasonable estimate according to Mudcat.) Throwing "The Cork Leg" into Google Books was marginally more helpful, in that it tells me the song was alluded to in print in 1838 (The Gentleman's Magazine), collected as early as 1853 (Davidson's Universal Melodist), and that Henry Clay Barnabee (publishing his memoirs in 1913) is very proud that his definitive performance of the ballad was appreciated by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I suppose the question is whether there was an earlier, perhaps less mechanically wacky version of the same name. I can't find anything resembling a first-run broadside or sheet music.