Give me that old time religion

(Photo: Simon Meeds)

It'll be a concise report of last week's session but I hope it will still give you a flavour of what happened.

There was a tongue in cheek note at the end of the previous week's blog report that there might be a theme of carrier bags. Colin started us off with his one plastic bag song: Benledi Street Ballad. Apparently Coin found three other songs about bags but hadn't been able to prepare them for performance.

I don't think Derek's Lake of Coolfin (Roud 189, Laws Q33) had anything to do with bags of any kind and neither did Geoff's first: Master McGrath (James Custer, Roud V32683).

Mike refused to sing Streets Of London, which of course mentions carrier bags but instead gave us a parody: McDonald's Kitchen (Seamus Kennedy). Simon claimed to have misheard Mike saying "plastic bags" and sang Richard Stilgoe's Little Plastic Packs.

This was followed immediately by Colin with Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah which Derek took as the call to a religious theme and gave us The Volunteer Organist by WB Glenroy (William B Gray) with music by Henry Lamb (Henry Spaulding). Simon's religious offering was The Unicorn Song (Shel Silverstein). Derek followed his theme with Dives And Lazarus (Roud 477, Child 56).. Mike joined in with The Vicar And The Frog (Stan Crowther). Colin found a pretty good fit for a follow-my-neighbour with The Frog's Courtship (Leslie Haworth). Derek's continued on this theme for two more songs: The Bitter Withy (Roud 452) and They're Shifting Father's Grave To Build A Sewer.

Geoff sang Golden Brown (Hugh Cornwell, Jean-Jacques Burnel, Dave Greenfield, Jet Black) and Mike found a good match for the title with Shallow Brown (Roud 2621).

It fell to Geoff to finish off the evening with Roger Whittaker's The Last Farewell.

(Number of people present - 5, of whom 5 performed)