(6/8) Emmerson RPTS 20 (G) [from SMM 1792]; [Green Slives] Gillespie MS. (1768), #179 [pt 4 #31]. [Green Sleeves]; SM 82-83; [Green Sleevs] CPC 8, 4. [Green sleeves] Balcarres Lute Book.

An old English air. Whitelaw says it’s also called Nobody can deny, from the burden of various ballads sung to it. [SMM #388. Simpson, BBBM p. 268.]

See Chappell, PMOT, I.239 ff (earliest mention, 1580).

The first time it appears in Playford (7th ed. 1686), it is called Green Sleeves and Pudding Pyes, one of the songs in Sportive Wit, or the Muses’ Merriment, 1656. In later editions it is called Green Sleeves and Yellow Lace, from Herd’s third stanza. (Cf. the Fool’s verse quoted above.) A text of the “Pudden-Pyes” song in Hecht, Herd MSS., 177 (no. LVII). 3×4 lines. Being a bit bawdy, it turns up in the Merry Muses [MMC (1964), 86n.; Randall Merry Muses (1966), 176]. Burns collected another (“Green sleeves and tartan ties/ Mark my true love whare she lies”), and transformed it into what Kinsley calls “a double entendre of some lyrical beauty.” A Jacobite version, taken down by Boswell from Flora MacDonald’s dictation, is in Tour of the Hebrides 26 Sept. 1773. There is also a children’s version, “Green peas, mutton pies,/ Tell me where my Jeanie lies,/ And I’ll be with her ere she rise,/ And cuddle her to my bosom.” – Sandy Candy (1948), 112 (#178), and elsewhere, e.g. a game sequence in Golspie, “Green peas, mutton pies,/ Tell me where my Bella lies./ I love Bella, she loves me,/ And that’s the lass that I’ll go wee.” (See Opies Singing Game (1985), 329-33.) See also Chappell PMOT 116, 227, 228, 230-33; 232, 775.