Valentine's Day 2020

(Photo: Simon Meeds)

At our Valentine's Day session it was great to see Mel return for his second visit and even better that he indicated it is likely to become a regular occurrence. There were many songs of love and/or lust and a few which were simply calendar-relevant.

Colin, our MC, started things off with Jan Knuckey.

Let's get out of the way the songs which referred to the calendar rather than to love and lust. The ones I spotted were Mike's Last Valentine's Day (Roud 6475) and Derek's Bold Princess Royal (Roud 528, Laws K29).

Simon's slightly sideways glance at Valentine started with reminiscences of a love lost with Harvey Andrews' Margarita. Mike's more conventional approach, if with some playing hard-to-get was Come Write Me Down (Roud 381).

Valentine's Day 2018

A blindfolded, armed Cupid (1452/66)
by Piero della Francesca

Last week's Dragon Folk Club session was our closest to Valentine's Day, so it was our usual seasonal theme of Love and Lust, a theme which had a very high hit rate. In fact I think that there were only three songs that didn't somehow connect to the theme, but even they were for very good reason.

The first was Derek with what he said was Ewan MacColl's version of Windy Old Weather. This was the completion of his final pair of songs from the previous week's session. I managed to find the lyrics in this document (page 73) but without attribution. I did however manage to find reference to it in relation to a radio programme "Singing the fishing" which was one of the Radio Ballads series (broadcast 16 August 1960, repeated 6 November 1960) which included in its credits Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger.

The other two off-theme songs should really have been admirably on theme. Derek sang The Bold Princess Royal (Roud 528, Laws K29) "On the 14th of February..." and Mike sang a hunting song, Last Valentine's Day (Roud 6475).

Valentine's Day 2015

CWAC Valentine's Day 1944

Ignoring the fact that it was Friday 13th, we concentrated on it being the day before Valentine's Day with a theme described by Mike as "Lust and Unrequited Love". I think everyone pretty much stuck to the theme even if we strayed even further than usual from the folk tradition. Roger set out on a tour of songs from the shows, claiming he was "doing a Simon", since Simon sang Summertime a couple of weeks ago.

Colin took the mantel of MC and got Mike to kick off with Black Sloven (Last Valentine's Day), which is not about love at all but is a hunting song. Nevertheless, it somehow got us off on theme.