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Found in Graham Seal's blog GRISTLY HISTORY -Chewy Chunks of the past which is well worth bookmarking
Lyrics, published 1939 in Ballads and Songs of Southern Michigan, Collected & edited by Emelyn Elizabeth Gardner and Geraldine Jencks Chickering & recorded by Ellen STEKERT in Songs of a New York Lumberjack, 1958 - track no. 5
A bushranger in America - Johnny Troy
‘The people round know me right well – they call me Johnny Troy’. The trouble was that no-one did know a bushranger hero named ‘Johnny Troy’, not in Australia, at least. So, who was he, if he ever existed?
There were several incidental mentions of him and his deeds in historical documents and folklore. He featured briefly in a poem titled ‘The Convict’s Tour to Hell’, probably composed by ‘Frank the Poet’ (Francis McNamara), in or before 1839. The poem is a celebration of convicts and bushrangers, including the famous Jack Donohoe, shot dead in 1830. Troy is mentioned in the same breath as the now much better-known Donohoe. The poem is fantasy of a convict, Frank himself, visiting hell, where he finds all the despised overseers and gaolers writhing in eternal agony. When the devil hears that Frank was a convict in life he immediately says that he has come to the wrong place. Convicts should all go to heaven. When Frank reaches the Pearly Gates, he confronts St Peter who asks:
where’s your certificate
Or if you have not one to show
Pray who in Heaven do you know?
Frank answers;
Well I know Brave Donohue Young Troy and Jenkins too
And many others whom floggers mangled
And lastly were by Jack Ketch strangled.
Frank is allowed straight into heaven where he is made ‘a welcome guest’, along with his old convict mates.
But that was about all anyone knew of this Irish bushranger until the 1950s, when American folksong collectors began to hear a ‘Johnny Troy’ ballad – mainly among lumber jacks. It seems that while Johnny Troy’s vigorous song had faded away in Australia, it had been well received by the Americans, who often sang it together with a couple of other Australian bushranger ballads, ‘Jack Donohoe’ and ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’. It is likely that these songs reached America during the California gold rushes, which explains how they got there.[i]But there was still no news of the lost bushranger in Australia. Until some solid research by the late Stephan Williams turned up the whole true history of Johnny Troy.[ii]
(Read on) .
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