"Polly Oliver", also known as "Polly Oliver's Ramble", "Pretty Polly Oliver" or "Sweet Polly Oliver" is an English air in 3/4 time and E Flat major. (I have transposed it to D major). This 17th century air is the vehicle for broadside ballads with several variant sets of lyrics. "Polly Oliver" is one of the better-known songs of the "female soldier" motif that tell of women disguising themselves as male sailors or soldiers to follow their men to war. The song, which may date from the wars with France of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was widely popular, to judge by the large number of broadside printings such as this. By the first half of the twentieth century it seems to have been better known in the American oral tradition than in the English. Thomas Root wrote a symphonic band arrangement and Benjamin Britten wrote an arrangement for voice and piano. It was printed in Chappell's Popular Music of the Olden Time, vol. 2 (1859) and Sharp's English Folk-Songs from the Southern Appalachians. It appears in the Roud Folk Song Index as #367. Other songs using the "female soldier" or "female sailor" in this collection are "The Handsome Cabin Boy" in the Sea Songs section and "Jackaroe" in this section.