Valentine's Day 2022

Last Friday it was good to see Mike back in fine voice following a dog-related incident which had kept him away. The said dog (Indy) was also present and had obviously been practising his scales. We had met to sing songs of love and lust for Valentine's Day (slightly prematurely) and that is pretty much what we did.

Colin, MCing as usual, started us off with Ralph McTell's The girl from the hiring fair. Simon followed with Scarborough Fair (roud 12, child 2) and Mike completed the first rotation with Come write me down (roud 381).

The only exception I have spotted to the love and lust theme was Mike's parting song, All the good times (Bob Pegg).

There were some doubles, the first one I noticed was Simon unusually singing two songs from Dolly Parton: Love is like a butterfly and Jolene.

Some humour came from Colin singing The Kipper Family's version of Soldier, soldier (roud 489), entitled The Disabled Seaman. This was also the only song from the evening for which I have been unable to find a YouTube recording.

Simon sang some songs more often sung by Colin: Running Bear (Jiles Perry Richardson "The Big Bopper") and Me and Bobby McGee (Kris Kristofferson, Fred Foster). In return Colin sang She Moves Through The Fair (roud 861) which Simon sometimes sings.

Colin took on quite a task of singing John Jacob Niles' song Venezuela, while Simon's biggest challenge may have been the guitar accompaniment for Margarita (Harvey Andrews).

Colin closed the evening with the second part of another double, this time from Donovan. He had earlier sung To sing for you, and now finished is off with Josie.

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

(Number of people present - 3 of whom 3 performed)

That's more like it

The club's old door poster

Last Friday's session was much livelier and more satisfactory than recent efforts. We were pleased to see Derek return to the fold, and Tom make his second visit since we restarted. Even better, Derek brought with him Maggie L and Gerty who we hadn't seen for a very long time. Let's hope we can not only carry on this way but gradually add more names to the roll-call.

MC Colin invited Mike to start the singing but in the end had to kick us off himself with Don't you rock me Daddy-o (Bill Varley, Wally Whyton) which was originally recorded by The Vipers Skiffle Group for whom it  reached number 10 in the UK Singles Chart in early 1957. The song is a variant of Sail Away Ladies (Roud 17635). Whyton was founder of the Vipers which became the resident band at the 2i's Coffee Bar in Soho and had its records produced by George Martin.

Mike did indeed sing the second song of the evening and it was one which Colin had requested the previous week, but which he wouldn't have dared sing had his wife, Maggie S been present. The extremely non-PC song in question was The Chinese Bum-boat Man (Roud 10465).

Tom treated us to an early Gerry Rafferty composition, Her Father Didn't Like Me Anyway. The song was on Rafferty's first solo album, "Can I Have My Money Back?" (1971), and had previously been released by his band, The Humblebums. The band was founded in 1965 by Billy Connolly and Tam Harvey with Rafferty joining in 1969.

Simon sang The Smuggler's Song, which was published in Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill. There is some discussion, not least from Tom who was present, about whether Kipling wrote the poem and who wrote the tune which Simon uses. Is it a variant of Peter Bellamy's tune, or of the one written by Christopher Le Fleming, or is it something else entirely? All Simon knows is that he got the tune from our late friend Ray Croll and that when he first heard Ray sing it the tune was already familiar to him from somewhere.

Derek said he doesn't usually sing a song he doesn't know although we know he sometimes pulls one out of a very dusty corner of his "bag" and sings it perfectly adequately. On this occasion though he started one knowing he would not get very far with it since he wanted to address Maggie L with the first verse of Come Write Me Down (Roud 381). With the first verse out of the way, Mike led us a little further down the path of the song he knows well.

And so the first circuit of the room was complete and there followed several more circuits until 31 songs and poems had been performed. This is not a record by any means (we think that would be about 47) but it is a good tally.

Worth a particular mention is that Tom read us two of his own poems. Grandad's Cracket concerns a stool that his grandfather made him for which young Tom seems to have found many uses. Tom gave a very emotional reading of The Driver, remembering the day when he saw a pit pony driver whose "eyes were full of tears" with a group of blind ponies that had finished their working lives. No one would tell him what lay in store for them and he only found out years later.

Derek was asked to finish the evening and clearing it with Maggie L that he would sing a bawdy song, he sent us home with Mary Went to a Tea Party (Roud 24991).

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

(Number of people present - 6, of whom 5 performed)

Valentine's Day 2020

(Photo: Simon Meeds)

At our Valentine's Day session it was great to see Mel return for his second visit and even better that he indicated it is likely to become a regular occurrence. There were many songs of love and/or lust and a few which were simply calendar-relevant.

Colin, our MC, started things off with Jan Knuckey.

Let's get out of the way the songs which referred to the calendar rather than to love and lust. The ones I spotted were Mike's Last Valentine's Day (Roud 6475) and Derek's Bold Princess Royal (Roud 528, Laws K29).

Simon's slightly sideways glance at Valentine started with reminiscences of a love lost with Harvey Andrews' Margarita. Mike's more conventional approach, if with some playing hard-to-get was Come Write Me Down (Roud 381).

Valentine's Day - 2019

(Photo: Simon Meeds)

Last week's Valentine's Day session brought out many tales of love and lust as well as a couple of unrelated but timely anniversaries.

Before I get started with the report we have some parish announcements since we are coming to peak theme season. All of the following themes are optional; you are always welcome to come along and perform anything you wish, or indeed take your place as an audience member, but if you can match the theme with one or two songs, stories or any other type of acoustic performance then so much the better. Where no theme is given for a particular Friday night it doesn't mean we don't meet, we almost always do, it's just that there is no specific theme planned, so come along with your own theme or none as you wish.

Valentine's Day 2017 and Trimdon Grange + 135

Tommy Armstrong

The report will be short and sweet this week since I've ended up writing at the last moment. Last week's session was themed Love and Lust for Valentine's Day. While we were small in number we were strong in voice, and joined as we were by our friends Joe and Josci, who we hadn't seen for some time.

Colin was MC and started off with a version of Clementine which was sung as Valentine. I haven't found any mention of it on the web, so all I can say about it with any confidence is that the first line is "In North Walsham by the cobbler's".

As you might expect there was some smut, including Colin's Bell Bottom Trousers (Roud 20105) and Simon's Big Bamboo.

Sick notes, back spasms and hard work

Addie Laird, 12 years old.
Spinner in a Cotton Mill.
Girls in mill say she is
10 years old, February 1910

There were a couple of announcements from Maggie at the head of this week's session. Following the recent death of our good friend Pat, Maggie announced that there will be a session in her memory on 3 October. Pat was being cared for at St Peter's Hospice so the raffle and any other donations that evening will be for the hospice. The week before, 26 September, will be Harvest, so bring along your harvest songs and produce. Any money raised that evening will also go to the hospice.

Pat's funeral will be at the United Reformed Church, Thornbury at 10:30 on Friday, 12 September with a wake afterwards at The Ship Inn, Alveston. There will of course be the usual Dragon Folk Club session in the evening, which will be MCed by Richard.

Taking the Michael

Cyril Tawney,
who wrote Grey Funnel Line

(I would like to thank Derek who stood in for me as "scribe" at this week's session and provided the following report)

With your regular scribe absent, an exhausted and ashen-faced replacement arrived, having come from running, for Sport Relief, a one mile cross-country in a torrential hailstorm.

With Mike and Maggie lost to the fleshpots of Bognor, reliving their babyhoods in the 1960s, Richard was in charge of a small but select band who met to celebrate the Spring, discuss music, swap anecdotes – but most of all to sing our way through as much of Mike's repertoire as possible before he could get back and fine us.

Mike's musical proclivities therefore led to a lot of shanties, fore-bitters and just general Songs of the Seven Seas being performed, in the certain knowledge that even if none of us could remember his singing the song in question, provided that it had a ship in it somewhere, he probably had dibs on it anyway. So the evening sailed along from the Grey Funnel Line to the Fish of the Sea (the latter being a version remarkably deficient – to my East Anglian ear – in any mention of Happisburg Light!) and from the Shantyman of the Wildgoose Nation to Roll the Woodpile Down (which at my advanced age I always associate with Dave Macon).

Valentine's Day - no massacre

The date was 14 February, Valentine's Day, so it seemed obvious that we should sing love songs, and so we did but at the Dragon Folk Club things are never quite that simple. Mike started off by announcing that the theme would be anti-love songs, something even he didn't stick to, but we did have some lust among the romance.

As last week, maybe it's becoming a (good) habit, Maggie S started us off with a poem by "Rick from Portishead" called A Valentine. Mike followed that up with Come write me down (The wedding song) (Roud 281).