 It was published in 1915 by Herbert Hughes who wrote that it had been collected in County Tyrone, and that it was a traditional ballad of the famine.It was recorded by John Avery Lomax from Irish immigrants in Michigan in the 1930s.The son in the song asks his father why he left the village of Skibbereen, in County Cork, Ireland, to live in another country, to which the father tells him of the hardship he faced in his homeland.