St Patrick's Day - 2018

Last week's session was for St Patrick, who is patron saint of engineers and paralegals as well as of many geographical locations but of course our main focus was on Ireland.

Colin was MC and he started the evening off with The Gals O' Dublin Town (Roud 7989).

We had a good representation of song of Ireland but a number of other events and occasions were also marked. Talk of Cheltenham races led to Derek singing Creeping Jane (Roud 1012, Laws Q23) and Colin, no doubt planned anyway as part of his Irish set, The Galway Farmer (Steve Knightley).

Derek, further delaying his entry into the week's theme, pointed out that the preceding Sunday had been Mothering Sunday, which he traditionally marks with the singing of The Rose And The Gillyflower.

Geoff and John P both marked recent deaths. Geoff was thinking of Professor Stephen Hawking with John D Loudermilk's He's Just A Scientist (That's All). John P recalled Ken Dodd with Think of Me (Wherever You Are), a translation credited to "Blackburn" of On Ne Dit Jamais La Vérité, written by Pascal Sevran, Pascal Auriat and Serge Lebrail, and performed by Pascal Auriat in the selection process for the French Eurovision song of 1975.

Apart from these notable exceptions, I think everything performed during the evening had some sort of Irish connection.ranging from the humourous such as Mike's Ancient And Old Irish Condom (sorry, the video may not play for that one) through the punk anarchy of The Pogues, offered to us by John P, for example in Sally MacLennane (Shane MacGowan) to the sweetness of songs such as Mike's Nancy Myles (Kevin Sheerin).

When Derek sang The Aldergrove Plane, he said it wasn't really in his repertoire. I said he had sung at the Dragon Folk Club before, and I can now confirm that was at the St Patrick's Day session in 2013.

The evening was brought to a close by Simon, singing Down By The Sally Gardens (WB Yeats). Yeats indicated in a note that it was "an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballisodare, Sligo, who often sings them to herself." The "old song" may have been the ballad The Rambling Boys of Pleasure.

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

(Number of people present - 6, of whom 6 performed)