Sweet Polly Oliver

Sweet Polly Oliver is an English broadside ballad (Roud #367), traceable from 1840 or earlier. It is also known as "Pretty Polly Oliver" and has several variant sets of lyrics, set to a single anonymous melody.

It is one of the best known of a number of folk songs describing women disguising themselves as men to join the army to be with their lovers.

Thomas Root wrote a symphonic band arrangement and Benjamin Britten wrote an arrangement for voice and piano.

Several versions of "Polly Oliver" survive as undated broadside ballad sheets in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/view/edition/4134

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