St Paddy Meets the Easter Bunny

Devastation caused by the Easter Rising.
Easter is a major holiday in Ireland,for a host of reasons,
some of which are religious and some historical.

Should readers, understandably distressed at finding that this week's blog has fallen into the hands of the Substitute Scribe, decide to leave precipitately, please at least pause to view this message – THERE IS NO CLUB MEETING ON FRIDAY 25TH MARCH (GOOD FRIDAY). This is due to the room's being used by the Inn for Easter festivities.

One result of the above was that this week's meeting became the optimal day for Easter songs as well as treading on the heels of St Patrick's Day. Most of those present confined themselves to the Irish aspect, although only DomBehan's Caesar's Conquest Of Ireland (Derek) actually recorded (albeit lesser known) events from the life of St Patrick himself!

No train wreck

This week's session (18 March 2016) will be our closest to St Patrick's Day, so you might like to bring along some Irish songs and tunes. Next week (25 March) will be Good Friday and there is an event at the pub, so we will not have a session but we will be back the following week for the 1 April. There's no official theme yet but I wonder whether some fooling around might be in order?

Last week, Colin was MC and Derek started us off with The Bailiff's Daughter Of Islington (Roud 483, Child 105). Mike got us all singing with Drink Old England Dry (Roud 882).

St David's Day and Mothering Sunday 2016

Yes we had a dual theme last week with St David's Day on 1st March and Mothering Sunday on the 6th (Don't get me started on why it isn't Mothers' Day). There was plenty for us all to go at, and Colin was MC.

Derek started us off with a song I failed to trace. The lines I noted down were: "On the 23rd day of September", "the Liverpool waters will ring" and "they destroyed the electric transformer". From something he said later, I assume, like two of his other songs this evening, it was written by Meic Stephens.

Yet another musical miscellany

The Mary Rose in a battle with seven Algerine corsairs
(an engraving by Wenceslas Hollar
who was on the ship at the time)

There was no theme for last week's session so we were free to come up with clusters of songs around various topics.

Colin was the MC and Mike kicked us off with the topical The Twenty Fourth of February (Roud 951) (sorry I couldn't find a recording in English), although he sang "twenty third". Apparently it describes a battle which took place on 29 December 1669 where Captain John Kempthorne on the fifth Mary Rose saved a convoy from attack by seven ships of Algerine pirates. He was knighted for this action.