St Andrew's Day 2017

Point of Sleat, Isle of Skye, Scotland
(Photo: Simon Meeds)

Last Friday's session saw a satisfactory number of seven bums on seats for a St Andrew's Day theme. I had pointed out in publicity that St Andrew is patron saint of many places and things other than Scotland, including singers, but it was barely needed since I think there were only two songs clearly unrelated to Scotland, one very deliberately and the other was written by someone with what appears to be a Scottish name.

Colin was the MC and he called on Steve C to start us off; Steve sang Jock Stewart (Roud 975).

Burns' Night 2017

reconstructed head of Burns

Finally a respectable quorum for this year's Burns' Night session. That is it was our Burns and Scotland themed session which took place two days after Burns' Night. In fact the attendance was so numerous that it even deserved three raffle prizes!

As always at The Dragon Folk Club, the theme was optional, so there was plenty of variety. Colin was MC and he started off proceedings with a comic offering from Captain Beaky: The Haggis Season (Jeremy Lloyd, Jim Parker).

I won't get into the debate about which songs and poems Robert Burns wrote, which he collected and which he stole, so please read anything in this blog post which claims to be by Burns as being any one of those options.

Roger recited The Banks O' Doon (Roud 13889 - Robert Burns) as a poem and Chris gave us the Eriskay Love Lilt (I grew up to that version by Judith Durham).

Mandela, floods and Scottish remnants

Hamish Henderson

The big world event this week was the death of Nelson Mandela. At the beginning of the evening only Derek had a relevant song; one he had written himself, called Mandela. This was a song which he considered to be poorly written and he had therefore sung it only three times before. This, he declared, would be its last outing. We didn't think it anywhere near so bad. Later on Terry turned up and sung another song related to South Africa. Unfortunately I've been unable to identify it.

Simon spoke of the tidal surge that has affected Lincolnshire. The flooding got to within a mile of his parents' house and flooded the homes of several people he knows. It was noted that Three score and ten would be appropriate but it had been sung the previous week. Simon had considered reading High tide on the coast of Lincolnshire by Jean Ingelow until he realised how long it is!