Last week's Dragon Folk Club session was our annual Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes Night theme. Anything about fireworks, fires, camping, or typical campfire songs was fair game and we did pretty well at sticking, albeit sometimes tenuously, to the theme.
This Friday the theme will be Remembrance, which you might also frame as armistice, war songs, anti-war songs, wartime songs... and in any case the theme is, as always, optional, so ultimately anything goes as long as it's acoustic.
Colin as MC got the ball rolling with the first of several songs he sang that were actually about Guy Fawkes, a feat the rest of us didn't match. His first was Penny for the Guy (* Leon Rosselson). This was the first of eight songs from the evening which were new to the Dragon database, but not necessarily all new to the club. Such songs are marked here with an asterisk (*).
Paul had not been present at the previous week's Halloween themed session so he harked back to the spooks with Sweet William's ghost (roud 50, child 77).
Denny proposed singing by the campfire Ten green bottles (* roud 7603). It was hard to choose videos to link for some of the songs this week. In this case I chose the one which gave the option of clicking through to a version of the song in mandarin, which I thought was quite cool.
Simon got his mention of bonfires in early, the second line, with Brian Bedford's This is the way the world ends, and so ended the first rotation.
Colin's next song was Guy Fawkes, Prince of sinister (* roud 4974), a humorous take on Guy Fawkes which dates from about 1800.
Colin's song on the following round was one he had sung before, but I have found more information. The grand old duke of York (roud 742) is a traditional nursery rhyme, but the version he sang was an extended one from a children's book illustrated by Maureen Roffrey and written by Roffrey together with Bernard Lodge, a British graphic designer best known for his work on early series of BBC TV's Doctor Who.
Paul sang the first song of the night not to be found on YouTube and therefore not included in the playlist linked from "a selection" below. It was Jon Heslop's comedic mashup of two traditional songs entitled Dead knight behind the hedge, which you can hear by clicking on that link.
I was disappointed not to find a recording, or really any mention, of Richard Digance's Boy scout song, which Colin sang. It used to be there, but it seems almost all trace of it has been removed from the web, not just from YouTube.
Another song not in the playlist was sung by Simon: When the scouts come hiking in, predictably to the tune of When the saints go marching in.
Colin introduced us to Quick's new speech for the fifth of November on the downfall of Guy Fawkes (* roud V27114), a broadside ballad published by JV Quick in the second quarter of the 19th century. The writing, printing and selling of the ballads that usually included a Guy Fawkes speech began in October in preparation for the bonfire celebrations on 5th November. In order to boost sales publishers attempted to vary the speeches from year to year. In this example the publisher announces in the title of his broadside that this year he is publishing an entirely 'new speech for the 5th of November.'
I know for a fact that Denny's performance of Norwegian Wood (This bird has flown) (John Lennon, Paul McCartney) isn't a first for the club, but it is a new entry in the Dragon database. I remember Keith G playing it as an instrumental when he had forgotten something: his word sheet or his glasses, but I can't guarantee to remember which.
Colin's I love to go a-gorging, a parody of The Happy Wanderer (roud 25580), is another song not found on YouTube as was his song Devil and the washerwoman.
Paul sang Salty young sea dog (Graham Holland), which was yet another not found on YouTube, which is proving quite weak this week. He went on to score a database entry with One man went to mow (* roud 143).
The final new entry in the database this week came from Colin and was Porridge tragedy (*).
The final song of the evening came from Paul who, inspired by Colin's singing of the same song on another occasion, gave us The Scaffold's 2 day's Monday (Mike McGear, Roger McGough and John Gorman).
Now listen to a selection of songs sung during this session.
(Number of people present - 4 of whom 4 performed)
