Short Stories

Joe Brown (Photo: Garry Knight)

One of my shorter reports this week I'm afraid but you can at least listen to many of the songs we sang last week by following the link at the bottom.

Eight wasn't a bad turn-out after the last few weeks. Colin as MC started us off with Joyce The Librarian (Peter Skellern, Richard Stilgoe).

Terry sang Pete Coe's The Wizard Of Alderley Edge and Roger gave us I Leave My Heart In An English Garden (Christopher Hassall, Harry Parr Davies).

Chris and Geoff presented a surprisingly well choreographed duet of Summer Wine (Lee Hazlewood) given that it was done on the spur of the moment. Geoff on his own pondered What A Crazy World We're Living In (Alan Klein) and Simon told Dave Sudbury's mainly true story of the King Of Rome.

Mike's first song of the evening, and the last of our first rotation, was Eric Bogle's And Now I'm Easy.

Mike's second song of the evening was prompted by Colin's singing the week before of The Rosabella. There was a time when that song was sung very frequently at folk clubs, and Mike himself sang it a lot, to the extent that he became fed up with it. Fellow Bristol Shantyman, Steve Vernon wrote for Mike the song Bored Of The Rosabella. Some time later Mike was singing Steve's song in front of a crowd including "the last shantyman", Stan Hugill, from whose definitive books the Bristol Shantymen obtained many of their songs. Stan gave Mike an accusatory stare and Mike didn't know what to expect... Stan wanted that song. Stan went on to include it in his repertoire but told the story of acquiring it from another shantyman: one who was dead before he was born.

I'm always interested in a coincidence and this has to be one, but one I don't really understand. Maybe someone can explain? Derek sang a version of Died For Love (Roud 60, Laws P25) which starts "A young British waterman courted me" and was apparently collected in Essex. This was followed immediately by Roger with the well known song There Is A Tavern In The Town. I've listed this latter song before as Roud 18834, and that indeed seems to be correct but it seems that Roud also lists it as 60, referring to Laws P25... the same as Derek's previous song. How can this be?

Together we got through an impressive number of songs, over 40 in the evening. The last was Derek with We Were Christening The Baby.

Here's a selection of songs sung during this session.

(Number of people present - 8, of whom 8 performed)