Surprisingly good - Excellent

(Photo: Simon Meeds)

For last week's session we had tentatively suggested the theme of "numbers". Knowing that all of our core members except Simon were otherwise engaged, he quite expected to be singing alone for the evening. Don't worry, it happens occasionally. Whoever is there has to stick around for a while in case others turn up, and if you are at a folk club then how better to pass the time than to sing.

Amazingly though with a quarter of an hour to go until our usual start time someone came through the door. It was Johannes, who is in Bristol for about a month and trying out various clubs while he's around. Simon explained the situation and Johannes was happy to stay on the basis of a singing pair.

No sooner had Simon, the stand-in MC,  started to sing than in walks Ray, who we have seen before, together with Kirsten who said she probably wouldn't sing - we tried to gently persuade her, but with no luck this time.

So, there were to be three singers, and with two relative newcomers there were bound to be plenty of new songs for the Dragon database. Unsurprisingly, only Simon really approached the theme, but that's fine.

As previously announced, because this Friday is the day after World Voice Day, the theme will be "Songs about Singing", but as usual the theme is entirely optional, so please come whether you sing, play, tell stories or perform in any way as long as it's acoustic - or indeed don't perform and wish to be our audience, partake of some banter and maybe join in a chorus or two.

Simon harked back to the previous week's Easter theme with The pace-egging song (roud 614) because of the counting in the chorus.

Johannes' debut was Johnny Barnes (* roud 39909) and was the first of many newcomers to the Dragon database.

Ray completed the first rotation with Every Time (* Tom Paxton).

As is the tradition I will mention all of the songs we heard from newcomer Johannes, who was very game to dig out thirteen songs through the evening. It would have been very understandable and perfectly fine if he had opted to site out some of his turns.

By chance we heard that both Johannes and Kirsten are half German, and so Johannes gave us three songs in the language:

• Die Gedanken sind frei
• Die Moorsoldaten (* Johann Esser, Wolfgang Langhoff, Rudi Goguel) - previously in the Dragon database only for the English translation
• Die Internationale (*) - originally written in French as a poem by Eugène Pottier and put to music a year later by Pierre De Geyter, this has been translated into many languages including into German by Emil Luckhardt. Previously the Dragon database only included an English version of which there are at least three.

Here are the rest of Johannes' songs except for one which will come later:

• The bee-boy's song (* Rudyard Kipling, Peter Bellamy)
• Windy old weather (* roud 472)
• They're going to build a motorway (* Leon Rosselson)
• My bonny bonny boy (* roud 293) - another version of roud 293, The grey hawk, was already in the Dragon database
• Georgie (* roud 90, child 209), an English traveller version of the Scottish song Geordie, which was already in the database; I won't attempt to comment on which came first.
• Buckets of rain (* Bob Dylan)
• Freight train (Elizabeth Cotten)
• The ant and the grasshopper (* Leon Rosselson)

Here are the other songs (yes there were even more) that were new to the database:

• Ray - Here's a health to the company (* roud 1801) - I picked the linked video for this report on 13th April 2026, the same day that Moya Brennan (Máire Philomena Ní Bhraonáin) of Clannad passed away.
• Simon - Eighteen pence on the bed (*# Tommy Daniel)
• Ray - Willow tree (* roud 18831)
• Ray - I got a name (*  Charles Fox, Norman Gimbel)

Simon asked Johannes to sing a closing song for the evening, bringing each of the singers' total to thirteen performances. I was not however so unlucky for the club since, defying the early expectations, it was a great evening.

• Johannes -  Shoals of herring (Ewan MacColl)

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

(Number of people present - 4 of whom 3 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 (#).