The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #79364   Message #2981162
Posted By: GUEST,SRD
06-Sep-10 - 06:09 PM
Thread Name: History - BBC's 'Singing Together'
Subject: RE: History - BBC's 'Singing Together'
My mother was a primary school teacher at various schools in NW Kent including our village school, St Pauls, in Swanley Village. One of the 'extra skills' she bought to the job was the ability to play the piano and accompany the songs in 'Singing Together', to provide the music for 'Music and Movement' and the later equivalents. Somewhere or other I still have some of the booklets (between 1955 and 1971). Those songs, although more than a little edited and bowdlerised, helped fix the idea of folk music in me.
I particularly remember 'Westering Home', 'No John', 'Garden Where the Praties Grow' as well as later stuff; a song about Newfoundland the chorus of which went something like:
'Hip your partner, Sally Thibeau,
Hip your partner Sally Brown,
Fogo, Twillingate, Moreton's Harbour,
All around the circle.'

And my younger siblings still sing
'Oh Dagobert half dachsund, half basset hound
had ears and a stomach that trailed to the ground.
And four legs so short that they did not make sense.
With such legs he'll never see over the fence.'