New Faces for May

Photo: Nikki T

I often say how great a session was in the report and I always mean it but last week was rather special. At the beginning of the evening we assembled as seven regulars, which would have been quite respectable but then a trickle of people started to file into our room, finally making up seven members of the Island Folk Choir. We were very pleased that as well as sharing some of their group singing, several members performed solo and in small groups.

As usual, Colin was MC and he started off the evening and the theme of "May" by singing Pleasant Month Of May (Roud 153); all of Colin's songs of the evening had May connections, however tenuous.

Benjamin Britten's gardener

Bob Hart

It looked as though we were going to be particularly thin on the ground this week, causing Mike to joke that it may "come round" once or even twice... every ten minutes. His scepticism was however put to bed when three further people came though the door - not a huge crowd but certainly enough to make a good do of it.

The three welcome latecomers were Carl, now almost a regular, who brought his brother-in-law, Derek (we'll call him Derek 2 to differentiate from our regular traditional singer of Suffolk origin with the same name), and Alison, whose arrival was somewhat sudden and startling but whose presence and singing were definitely more soothing.

Mike started us off with a newly "discovered" Bristol version of Outward bound a sea song, which he had explained on a previous occasion is not a shanty because shanties are either outward or homeward bounders, whereas this song mentioned both directions.