My friend and colleague Bob Webb has a pretty large collection of the Singing Together books ('pamphlets', we called them) and we were looking through them recently.
The memories, as they say, came flooding back when we came to songs like 'Riding On A Donkey', 'Dashing Away With A Smoothing Iron' and, especially, an extraordinary song called 'Old Zip Coon'.
'Old Zip Coon he played all day, until the neighbours ran away; he played all night by the light of the moon, but he wouldn't play anything but Old Zip Coon'. What was that all about?
Actually my primary education, in a little country school in Cheshire, had quite an element of folk tradition to it and perhaps it is no coincidence that I later went on to become one of the founders of Middlewich Folk & Boat Festival. As well as 'Singing Together' (and the dreaded 'Music & Movement')on the BBC Home Service we also had 'country dancing' to the accompaniment of ancient Jimmy Shand Records.Not only that, we also had our own Maypole, and I was a member of a small elite able to do 'plaiting' as well as ordinary dancing.
And, in an uncanny foreshadowing of 'Don't Sit On My Jimmy Shands', our Headmistress, Miss Mason, did exactly that and broke several of them.
Thanks for the memories, folks.