Three into 50 doesn't go

Upton station, Co.Cork (Photo: Ralph Rawlinson)

Oh dear! We're still celebrating the club's 50th anniversary (two more weeks to go) but last week's turn-out was very meagre, not strictly quorate, but we carried on regardless, at least up to a slightly early finish.

Colin, MCing as usual, sang the first of three Woody Guthrie songs of the evening, This Land Is Your Land (Roud 16378). His second Guthrie was Hard Travelin' (Roud 13926). Derek made up the hat-trick with a song that Woody apparently wrote when challenged to sing about the Ladies' Auxiliary. This linked recording appears to be an extended version since printed lyrics usually agree with Derek's rendition that it consists only of a sort of chorus of four lines. Guthrie had in fact earlier sung about the same subject in his song Union Maid (and Pete Seeger finishes this recording off with the original short version).

In an attempt to make up for the lack of singers and to fulfil the aim of these anniversary sessions of singing songs from the club's past, we picked some from the repertoires of current and past regulars at our sessions. Simon started this off with one from Ray Croll's repertoire, Wee Dark Engine Room (Harry Robertson). Colin also plundered Ray's songbook for Crazy Man Michael (Richard Thompson, Dave Swarbrick) and I think Derek's Bold General Wolfe (Roud 624) came from Mike.

Simon borrowed from Terry C for John O' Dreams (Bill Caddick, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky) and Colin went to Mike for Shoals Of Herring (Ewan MacColl) while Simon brought Leslie into the mix with Poor Paddy Works On The Railway (Roud 208).

This last of these songs caused Derek to continue with a version, or maybe extension which he says was performed by, and possibly written by Dave Douglas, which has "In eighteen hundred and forty eight, they caught my head between two plates" and goes on to "the Tories closed the railway".

Derek set us a challenge to which we couldn't rise. It involved the link between two songs. The first song was Road By The River (Roud 13743). The writer, Frank O'Donovan included a verse:

I had only one brother, a gay lad and droll,
He was killed in an ambush, now God rest his soul.
On the spot where he fell, a white cross can be seen,
On the road by the river that flows through Raheen.

Apparently some people believe this refers to a younger brother who was killed during the Upton train ambush of 15 February 1921, which brings us to the second song, about that incident, Upton Ambush (Roud 9695). The problem, Derek said, was that there was no O'Donovan in the list of casualties. Derek thinks this could be because the brother may have been killed but not directly involved in the ambush; a bystander if you like. He challenged me to research this.

In the limited time I have had I haven't exactly got to the bottom of it but I found an account which attempts to list the civilians who were killed. The list doesn't include an O'Donovan but there is something strange here. It says "One of the civilian victims, who had his head blown off, was a Mr Galvin, a well-known commercial traveller who used this train regularly", yet even he isn't listed among the casualties.

We can also say that the verse quoted above is definitely at least to some extent a fiction because Frank had at least one (older) brother, Harry O'Donovan, a comedy scriptwriter, stage manager and actor who died in 1973.

Looking back at old blog reports, I have always failed to match Derek's version of She Moves Through The Fair (Roud 861) to anything but maybe I've cracked it this time. I think he combines it with The False Hearted Lover (Roud 6574), starting as he does with "I once loved a young girl and I loved her right well".

It was down to Colin to finish off the evening with a song borrowed from Mike, John Tams' Rolling Home.

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

(Number of people present - 3, of whom 3 performed)