I'd be interested to see the lyrics to 'the blackman's dream'.

what exactly is a 'blackman' in this context?!

In Paddy Tunney's book 'the stone fiddle' he features a couple of Orange songs. I think he used to sing them, not just collect them. 'The Purple Boy' has a great, fusty, arcane lyric, which puts it in similar territory to those mystical Irish masonic songs. There seem to be quite a few Orange songs in this kind of tradition – rather esoteric and pompous in a dusty old esoteric culty way – that I've come across thanks to the repertoires of Tunney, Len Graham and Frank Harte.

I sing one or two of them around the house, but I'd feel uncomfortable singing them out. It's one thing to be Irish and sing them - I feel that the songs I'm talking about are, relatively peaking, politically anodyne, focusing on the minutiae of tradition, and can be sung on both sides of the political divide in this day and age. But it's quite another thing for a middle-class englishman to sing them – suddenly there's a whole other political context.