The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #160075 Message #3795066
Posted By: Jack Campin
12-Jun-16 - 10:17 AM
Thread Name: Lyr Req: Trad songs featuring color
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Trad songs featuring color
Colours as badges of political allegiance go back a long way. The blue and grey of the opposing sides in the US civil war; the colours of cockades in Britain when the Jacobites and Hanoverians were slogging it out; colours associated with Irish politics.
There was a series of songs that may have made an oblique comment on those. "The Black Jock" was a bawdy Anglo-Irish song from Dublin in the 1730s; a jock is female public hair. The followups included The White Jock, The Grey Jock and The Blue Jock (maybe also a Green Jock). Google image search will tell you what they had in mind, but I didn't think blue was chemically possible in the middle of the 18th century.
Maybe closer to what you have in mind, what's that song about the kid who likes to draw things in his own personal choice of colours until the art teacher beats it out of him?