Mainly mining

Durham Miners' Gala (Photo: Darrell J Rohl)

Last week's session looked like being similar to the previous one with four people present at the start but over the course of the first few songs our numbers were swelled to a respectable eight. There was no official theme and Colin, in his role as MC, started us off with John of Dreams (Bill Caddick, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky). Colin noted that this was a song often sung by our friend Terry C at our sessions.

Two further songs from Terry C's repertoire were sung, mike, pointing out that he had been singing it longer than Terry, gave us Eric Bogle's No Use For Him and Simon sang Hughie Jones' The Ellan Vannin Tragedy.

Stories, songs and not-so-shaggy dogs

Elder Joseph Brackett

This week's count of humans was pretty good at twelve, and our number was indeed swelled by the presence of three canines. Apart from the usual Indy, we were joined by both Gerty and Freddie who seemed to mainly successfully show Indy a good example for folk session canine etiquette.

Richard was the MC and started off the evening himself with The Day The Pub Burned Down (RG "Bob" Edwards), which is a sort of New Zealand version of The Old Dun Cow (Roud 5323).

Derek correctly challenged me to be unsuccessful at finding a version of his first song on You Tube, it being Wardley's Great White Wall (note that the linked item is written by Derek himself), the song sung at the start of the last shift at Wardley Colliery, which had to shut down when the coal seam finished in a wall of chalk. Derek got the song from Dave Douglass, who worked at Wardley and who Derek thinks may have written the song.Derek was actually singing the song to mark the closure of Hatfield Main Colliery where Douglass later worked.