Fun with ballad meter

[sineala]

So one of the fun facts that I assume most of you learned in, say, high school English class is that most (all?) of Emily Dickinson's poetry is in ballad meter (apparently similar to "common meter," the internet informs me). This would be alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter. You probably also learned that you can sing her poetry to any one of a number of songs, because the fun thing about ballad meter is that it's also popular for, well, ballads. Yay traditional folk. The song I learned this trick with was "Battle Hymn of the Republic," but you may have learned it with other songs.

This came up in the other day's XKCD comic, and so the commenters on the LJ feed were happily sharing all the songs you can sing Emily Dickinson to, when someone came along and blew all our minds by pointing out the obvious corollary: if all these songs can be sung to the same poems, they can therefore be sung to each other's words.

I trust you will see the obvious hilarity of this.

A sampling of possibilities:
Amazing Grace
Battle Hymn of the Republic (or, if you prefer the tune's original words, "John Brown's Body")
Clementine
Gilligan's Island theme song
Greensleeves
House of the Rising Sun
O Little Town of Bethlehem
The Yellow Rose of Texas

"Amazing Grace" is a lot jauntier as a battle hymn, let me tell you. Go on, try it! Bwahaha.

Does anyone have any other ballads they would like to share? Or, for that matter, fitting poetry?

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