St David's Day 2024

(AI image from Stable Diffusion)

Last week's Dragon Folk Club session actually fell on St David's Day, so no excuse was required to try to sing things related somehow, sometimes tenuously, to Wales... or even sometimes to whales (oh well). We were fine with four singers, but unusually we also had an audience member in the person of Denny's sister, who was a very welcome addition. I hope she enjoyed her evening; at least she laughed in all the right places.

This Friday's session (8th March) will have no theme, but then next week (15th March) we will be celebrating St Patrick's Day just two days early. I'll leave detailed suggestions of what you might like to do until next week's report.

We had a bumper set of 40 performances last Friday, and I should say that if any of them appear derogatory to Wales or the Welsh, no offence is intended. These are songs and poems from all sorts of different sources and of varying ages. Please enjoy all the recordings linked from "a selection" below in the spirit of entertainment.

There were just three performances for which no representative YouTube video could be found:

• Colin - Children born to the valleys (Dawson Smith)
• Simon - The ice cream bells of Porthcawl (Les Barker)
• Colin - From green to black (Dawson Smith)

It was in fact Denny who kicked off proceedings with a song variously called "Always eat when you are hungry" or "Don't forget to breathe or else you'll die. The song features sung by Gracie Fields at the end of the film Molly and Me from 1945 and an earlier recording can be found at 2:05 in this Vitaphone short from 1928 called The Beau Brummels and featuring the vaudeville act Shaw and Lee. Denny however sang more words and to the tune Cwm Rhondda.

Simon took a leaf out of our friend Derek's book in order to follow the theme by trying and not always succeeding to sing songs from the repertoire of traditional Gower singer Phil Tanner. The Gower Wassail (roud 209) was partly successful, and Barbara Allen (roud 54, child 84) more so as was The oyster girl (roud 875, laws Q13), albeit not Tanner's version, but acquired from the singing of Rosie Upton (who is in the linked video). Although he had a couple more songs in this vein on file he cut his losses at this stage.

Colin's singing of The bells of Rymney (Idris Davies) gives me the chance to roll out a fun video made by our friend Gabe in which he visited each of the locations mentioned in the song/poem.

As people started to run out of Welsh songs (except for Colin who lasted out the night) we had a number of perfectly good if geographically random mining songs such as Paul with Close the coalhouse door (Alex Glasgow), and Denny with Down in your mine (Colin Wilkie).

Well' I've just about run out of time to write this report, so I'll just mention that Simon finished the evening with When all men sing (Keith Scowcroft, Derek Gifford).

Now listen to a selection of songs sung during this session.

(Number of people present - 5 of whom 4 performed)