The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #108112   Message #2247891
Posted By: Ythanside
29-Jan-08 - 11:46 AM
Thread Name: What did your Dad used to sing?
Subject: RE: What did your Dad used to sing?
My old man sang almost constantly, and his repertoire varied according to how much money he had in his pocket at the time.
When flush he would be all 'Girls Were Made to Love and Kiss', 'Sweet Sixteen', 'Kathleen', 'Just a Little Love, a Little Kiss' and virtually anything optimistic from Richard Tauber or Frans Lehar's Viennese operettas.
Broke, and therefore rather melancholic, he would go through the card from Pagliacci to any other wrist-slitting, blood-and-gore opera that took his jaundiced fancy.

One song that I only ever heard him sing at New Year, and have never heard sung by anyone outside of my immediate family, was a rather short WWI number called 'The Bombing Raid'. The words, as I recall them, are as follows.

THE BOMBING RAID

Listen and I'll tell you,
How the Jocks spent their New Year,
They were standing in the trenches,
With the mud right up to here,
And soaking through, and through and through.
Aha, said Fritz, the time is right,
For the Jocks are fu' the noo,
So the plan was made for the bombing raid.
They were up against the men o' marmalade,
But if Fritz had only known,
That that trench held Dundee's own,
He would never, never made that bombing raid.