The song "All Around my Hat" (Roud 567[1] and 22518,[2]Laws P31) is of nineteenth-century English origin.[3] In an early version,[citation needed] dating from the 1820s, a Cockneycostermonger vowed to be true to his fiancée, who had been sentenced to seven years' transportation to Australia for theft and to mourn his loss of her by wearing green willow sprigs in his hatband for "a twelve-month and a day", the willow being a traditional symbol of mourning.[4] The song was made famous by Steeleye Span,[5] whose rendition may have been based on a more traditional version sung by John Langstaff, in 1975.[6][7][8]
^S.G. Spaeth. A History of Popular Music in America, pp. 83–84 (1948, ISBN978-0-394-42884-0), quotes a song said to be from around 1840, that goes, "All round my hat, I vears [sic] a green villow [sic]."
^See Othello, 4:3, in which Desdemona sings a willow song and asks Emilia about omens of weeping. Another Elizabethan willow song mentions the wearing of the green willow; this is in a poem by John Heywood, dated circa 1545 (Br. Mus. addit. No. 15,233): "All a green willow, willow, willow, All a green willow is my garland." See Norman Ault, Elizabethan Lyrics, pp. 14–15, 519 (1949). Robert George Whitney Bolwell, The Life and Works of John Heywood, identifies this Heywood work as the song "The Ballad of the Green Willow". He points out that this is a predecessor of Shakespeare's Willow Song, which merely changes the word "is" in the refrain to "must be".
^Their video version is available on [www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zzwbYyvWiU|Youtube]. (This is not the traditional version; it is a rock version.)