The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #8831   Message #55715
Posted By: Philippa
26-Jan-99 - 06:31 AM
Thread Name: Dark Irish kid tunes
Subject: RE: Dark Irish kid tunes
In the 1970s I worked for a short while with children's playgroups in Belfast. I heard the "Granny" song then, and I also heard a lot of political and sectarian ditties.
"Georgie Best [soccer football player] super star/He wears frilly knickers and a padded bra", a parody itself, became
IRA superstars, how many Para's {paratroopers]have you shot so far
a hundred and one,with a Thompson gun
Two were lucky, they got shot in the bum.

A sample of a sectarian verse is:
The Pope was in the German tank, Parley-vous
The Pope was in the German tank, Parley-vous
The Pope was in the German tank, reading a 'Beano' and having a wank
Inky-pinky Parley-vous

I don't think that qualifies for the "MacarĂ³nachas" thread. I have chosen to remember the more repeatable of these ditties! Folklorists and ethnomusicologists missed an excellent opportunity for field research in song transmission. If you had your ear to the ground, you could follow how some songs were adopted from one area of the city to the next: "Have you heard of the battle of Ballymurphy/Where most of the fighting was done?..." became "...the battle of the Markets..." became "...the Battle of the Shankill...". The first two are Nationalist, the latter Loyalist. We took mixed groups away on holidays, they got on fine, and then we heard "UDA superstars...".