Avoidance behaviour - fine

The Anchor Inn, home of The Middle Bar Singers
at Sidmouth Folk Festival (Photo: Barry W*******)

Don't forget our St Andrew's Day session this Friday - OK, more St Andrew's eve but you get the idea, Scottish songs and tunes are the main dish with possible sides of his other patronages.

Back now to last weeks theme-free session, Colin started it off with Wally Whyton's Leave Them A Flower.

We proceeded through Derek's Locke Hospital (Roud 2, Laws Q26), and Mike's Rolling Home (Roud 4766) with no discernible theme apart from Derek declaring the efforts he was making to save his Scottish ballads for St Andrew.

That's not to say we didn't have links, both intentional and unintentional of course. Simon's singing of Down Our Street including its suggestion that in desperate times "tom cat tastes like air" inspired Derek to give us Silver Threads Among The Butter, which Martin Carthy took as the first verse of his song Girls: "When the dog died we had sausages, When the cat died, catnip tea".

Colin sang Garrison Keillor's version of The Times They Are A-Changin'. In this video he (Keillor) is performing slightly different words.

Derek sailed close to the wind singing Young Buchan (Roud 40, Child 53) which he says is a Northumberland version of the song listed by Roud variously under Bacon and Beichan, being a Scottish version of Lord Bateman.

Mike encouraged us to do the comedic actions to Pleasant And Delightful (Roud 660, Laws O30) and declared that if he'd done that in the "middle bar" at Sidmouth Folk Festival he would have been handed down a fine. It wasn't clear to me at least whether the fine would be for singing it, encouraging the actions, or faltering in one of the verses. Anyway, Derek later proclaimed that he too would court a Sidmouth fine by singing Wild Rover No More (Roud 1173); note though that this is an authentic English version, not that adopted by the Irish following its use by The Dubliners. In case you are new to this blog it may be worth mentioning that Wild Rover is correctly an English song, almost certainly derived from the earlier and equally English Green Bed (Roud 276 ; Laws K36).

Another connection, though it went unremarked, seemed to me to be between Colin's I'se The B'y (Roud 4432) and Derek's Dogger Bank (Roud 18836).

Simon closed the session with When All Men Sing (Keith Scowcroft, Derek Gifford), as he said "falling into the Last Of The Summer Wine trap several times" ("compare and contrast" as Annie Nightingale used to say on BBC Radio 1).

Now listen to a selection of songs sung during this session.

(Number of people present - 4, of whom 4 performed)