St Andrew's Day 2025

(Photo: Simon Meeds)

Our faithful MC Colin was otherwise engaged during last week's Dragon Folk Club session so Simon took up the pen, ledger and metaphorical gavel. Theme accuracy was not 100%  given that Paul and Denny, who had been absent the previous week, both started by harking back to Remembrance before honouring Denny's native county on Lancashire Day and eventually joining us in Scotland. Roger on the other hand took the opportunity that our themes are always optional and sang a wide variety of styles, but of course since St Andrew is the patron saint among other things of singers, nothing was truly off-topic this time anyway.

Roger had been first to arrive at The Bridge so he was called upon to start the evening, which he did with Proud Mary (* John Fogerty).

Simon was first to take us to Scotland with Dougie MacLean's Caledonia.

As already mentioned, Paul and Denny started off in a remembrance theme with Poor murdered men (*# Jon Heslop) and A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square (Eric Maschwitz, Manning Sherwin) respectively. The latter was Denny's father's favourite song and was sung at his funeral by her late sister-in-law. Denny's singing of the song also marked both of their birthdays.

And so we came to the end of the first rotation.

Having already mentioned two above, there were a further two songs new to the Dragon database this time, both sung by Denny. The first was November drinking song (* Bryan Hawes, Martin Graebe). The second gave me a little more of a problem. The only trace I could find of Drink to the Laddies (* Sue West) on YouTube (and therefore the version I included in the playlist linked from "a selection" below) was this slightly raucous and badly recorded "Drink to the lassies". But we don't give up so easily here, and a more respectable version, sung by Dutch shanty choir De Kaapstander was found here in the middle of a longer video.

It also fell to Denny to round off the session with a Scottish version of Rolling home (roud 4766).

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

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

In the above report songs new to the Dragon database (though no always new to the club) are marked with an asterisk (*) and any songs not included in the "a selection" playlist are marked with a hash (#).