On the liner notes of The Irish Edge (1966) Seán O Boyle wrote: ‘This song is a fine example of a very common folk-song type – the Chanson du Malmarié. As the Irish proverb has it, there is nothing as bad as a bad match, so ill-matched husbands have always found their grievances well-aired by folk-poets-sometimes jauntily as here, and sometimes pathetically as in The Old Man Rocking the Cradle.

Like all songs of this type, the singer ends with good advice for those contemplating matrimony:

My advice it is to you
Is to marry for love and work for riches.
If you can't get a girl with an honest tongue, 

That’ll give you leave to wear your britches.

The Tunneys, Joe and Paddy, got The Wearing of the Britches from an old neighbour, Pat Bell Keown. The tune is reminiscent of a Gaelic drinking song Olaim Puins (I Drink Punch), and perhaps the marriage of words and air is most appropriate.’ 

Pat Bell remembered buying the song at a fair in 1886: ‘I bought it at a halfpenny in the – in Ballyshannon town on the 25th of March eighteen-and eighty-six. And I never heard it sung local. It was a ballet I bought in the year of eighty-six. I never knew a man had it only one. He lived between me and Derrygonnelly.’

*The notes for songs 28-42, if not covered by earlier entries, have been compiled by John Tunney.