Author Archives: Quentin Bega

There’s no fool like an old fool, they say, so what happens when a bunch of oul’ coots gather together to make music? The next batch of posts may enlighten you as to the question just posed and may also, perhaps, enrage or entertain. Anything’s better than a yawn, I guess. And everything that is not that bloody virus is a plus. At the moment we can’t meet as a group, as we are in lockdown, so I have set out a version of songs that are in our repertoire but which have not yet been recorded. With any luck (and, as three of us are north of 70, we’ll need it!) we will be able to resume our normal practice of meeting weekly and playing tunes, singing songs and generally enjoying the crack.

At the heart of Celtic beliefs is the sacred notion of hospitality. In Shakespeare’s Scottish Play,(I am not really superstitious but why take chances!) the protagonist ponders the breach of hospitality he is considering: He’s here in double trust:/First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,/Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,/Who should against his murderer shut the door,/Not bear the knife myself.

“The reigns of mythic kings were judged on their hospitality (or lack thereof). Once, when Bres, a warrior of the Fomorian people — the “bad guys” of Celtic myth — became king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, he quickly became renowned for his parsimony. Bards complained that visitors to his house could count on leaving with no smell of beer on their breath! Finally, a bard named Cairbre was fed up enough to write a satire about the ungenerous king—the first satire ever composed in Ireland. Its effect was blistering—literally—as it caused sores to burst forth on Bres’ face, blemishing him and making him unfit to rule.

Celtic hospitality is not just a matter of folklore and legend. One time I was in Banbridge, Co. Down, and couldn’t find lodging; I mentioned this to the owner of a pub and he spent the next half hour driving me around until I found a room for the night. An even better tale comes from a former student of mine, who had a flat tire once while traveling in rural Ireland. Stopping in front of a farmhouse and hoping to use the phone, he met the farmer who insisted on fixing the tire himself—and then the farmer’s wife invited my student and his family in for dinner. And of course, talk of payment was quickly squelched. “No need for that,” the farmer said simply.” (from a post by Carl McColman)

But we now travel back in time to the circumstances of the massacre. On the 13th of February, 1692, following the Jacobite uprising an estimated thirty-eight members and associates of Clan MacDonald of Glencoe were killed by government forces billeted with them on the grounds that they had not been prompt enough in pledging allegiance to the new monarchs, William of Orange and his queen, Mary.

Others are alleged to have died of exposure- estimates ranging from forty to one hundred. Many people think that this is a traditional song, including John McDermott, whose version I first heard, in the mid-1990s, on his double-platinum disc Danny Boy. Like so many mistaken claims made for songs being from the anonymous folk tradition, this song has, in fact, a known writer, Jim McClean, who wrote this moving ballad in 1963. I have performed this song at clubs in western Sydney over the years. Who knows when the virus will allow such gatherings to go ahead?

There’s no fool like an old fool, they say, so what happens when a bunch of oul’ coots gather together to make music? The next batch of posts may enlighten you as to the question just posed and may also, perhaps, enrage or entertain. Anything’s better than a yawn, I guess. And everything that is not that bloody virus is a plus. At the moment we can’t meet as a group, as we are in lockdown, so I have set out a version of songs that are in our repertoire but which have not yet been recorded. With any luck (and, as three of us are north of 70, we’ll need it!) we will be able to resume our normal practice of meeting weekly and playing tunes, singing songs and generally enjoying the crack.

I first heard this song from the Dubliner’s album Plain and Simple in the mid-1970s. I do believe that Barney McKenna sang it- a rarity- for he usually just confined himself to being the best tenor banjo player in the known universe.

I learned from the Mainly Norfolk website that the song was, according to Danny Spooner, “written by John Conolly in 1966, this song has become so much a part of the folksong culture that it’s often referred to as a traditional song—a great compliment indeed. Fiddler’s Green was a name for areas of docklands and ports frequented by sailors ashore. But over time the sailor’s imagination turned those districts into Utopia or even Heaven. Wouldn’t it be nice?”

Herman Melville describes Fiddler’s Green as a sailors’ term for the place on land “providentially set apart for dance-houses, doxies, and tapsters” in his novella Billy Budd, Sailor, in 1924.

Fiddler’s Green appears in Frederick Marryat’s novel The Dog Fiend,  published in 1856, as lyrics to a sailors’ song: At Fiddler’s Green, where seamen true/When here they’ve done their duty/The bowl of grog shall still renew/And pledge to love and beauty.

Many places associated with the U.S. Military have been named Fiddler’s Green, including:

• The U.S. Marine Corps operated Firebase Fiddler’s Green  in the heart of the Helmand River Valley, in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
• An artillery Fire Support Base in Military Region III in Vietnam  in 1972, occupied principally by elements of 2nd Squadron, 11^th Armored Cavalry.
• The base pub at the Joint Forces Training Base, Los Alamitos, CA
• Former dining facility used by 2nd Cavalry Regiment at Fort Polk, LA
• An artillery only pub for the 10th Marine Regiment, Camp Lejeune, NC

The reason for this association is not immediately evident, but may stem from a poem The Cavalrymen’s Poem, also entitled “Fiddlers’ Green” which was published in the U.S. Army’s Cavalry Journal in 1923. Some of the lines are given below:

Halfway down the trail to Hell in a shady meadow green,/are the Souls of all dead troopers camped near a good old-time canteen,/and this eternal resting place is known as Fiddlers’ Green… Marching past, straight through to Hell, the Infantry are seen,/accompanied by the Engineers, Artillery and Marine,/for none but the shades of Cavalrymen dismount at Fiddlers’ Green. ( my thanks to Wikipedia for the information given above)

Now, this song is usually sung by Sam the Man, but, as we are all in lock-down I get to sing songs I like from both our main singers!

There’s no fool like an old fool, they say, so what happens when a bunch of oul’ coots gather together to make music? The next batch of posts may enlighten you as to the question just posed and may also, perhaps, enrage or entertain. Anything’s better than a yawn, I guess. And everything that is not that bloody virus is a plus. At the moment we can’t meet as a group, as we are in lockdown, so I have set out a version of songs that are in our repertoire but which have not yet been recorded. With any luck (and, as three of us are north of 70, we’ll need it!) we will be able to resume our normal practice of meeting weekly and playing tunes, singing songs and generally enjoying the crack.

Come Up the Stairs A couple of years ago I attended a reunion, ninety minutes south of Sydney, in Wollongong of, Seannachie, the band I was part of in the 1970s. It was a memorable weekend starting with folk open-mic at a bowlo in North Wollongong at which I drank lots of Guinness and sang, The Streets of Forbes and Her Father Didn’t Like Me, Anyway. When asked for a few more songs later in the night, I had to demur, for obvious reasons.

I stayed with Joe Brown, the guitarist with the group. The next day we gathered at the house built by Bertie McKnight, the mandolin player. There, also, was Johnny Spillane, the whistle player and Tony Fitzgerald, the main singer of the group who had learned to play the guitar in the decades intervening.

We swapped songs and yarns all day and, after Joe and I  returned to his place, he found an old cassette and played this song from circa 1975 which I had learned from a Johnny McEvoy record a few years before. Anyone remember cassette players, apart from us oldies?

I had completely forgotten about it and determined to resurrect it for performance with the group I helped establish in western Sydney in the mid-1990s, Banter.

I placed a flamenco-flavoured introduction before the song proper and provided an outro of rolling chords, reminiscent of the sea- in my fancy- Am/C/F/E/Am/C/F/E/G…/Am… It has become one of the favourite songs in our repertoire. But this is only, as they say, a pale shadow of the live performance.

The song was written by Shay Healy, Irish broadcaster, songwriter, and journalist. He got the 9/8 tune from his mother who was a noted singer of old Irish traditional songs. This explains why so many people think this is an old song, but the lyrics were written by Healy sometime in the 1960s.

A piece of trivia- appropriate, perhaps, for this strange time of COVID lockdown: Shay Healy also wrote Ireland’s winning entry for the 1980 Eurovision Song Contest, sung by Aussie Johnny Logan. The song’s title: What’s Another Year? Oh Really? This year, 2020, will live in infamy- to quote FDR

There’s no fool like an old fool, they say, so what happens when a bunch of oul’ coots gather together to make music? The next batch of posts may enlighten you as to the question just posed and may also, perhaps, enrage or entertain. Anything’s better than a yawn, I guess. And everything that is not that bloody virus is a plus. At the moment we can’t meet as a group, as we are in lockdown, so I have set out a version of songs that are in our repertoire but which have not yet been recorded. With any luck (and, as three of us are north of 70, we’ll need it!) we will be able to resume our normal practice of meeting weekly and playing tunes, singing songs and generally enjoying the crack.

In the Irish tradition this is known as “All For Me Grog” and is sung with gusto. In Australia, having moved across the sea and moved inland, it slows down and becomes more wry and sombre. Here we find a swaggie, who has just sold his moke (a broken-down horse) for drinking money.

It was a feature of the various gold diggings in Australia for luckless scroungers to supplement their incomes by illegal fossicking on another’s claim. This was known as “plundering”. Our narrator is in an outback shanty bar where he has just spent all his money- or “plunder”. The subject of our song resolves to head back to the diggings and peg out a claim and settle down to some hard yakka (hard work).

The Dubliners’ 1967 version, is faster and jollier and features women. Alas, in 19th Century Australia, women were in short supply out in the bush, hence the difference in the second last line of the chorus where, instead of…I’ve spent all me tin with the ladies drinking gin, we get…I’ve spent all me tin in a shanty drinking gin. This may explain why the Aussie version is a lot more doleful.

You’ll also hear reference to the Darling Pea. This addictive plant is poisonous to livestock. A vet from that time describes the effects of Darling Pea on livestock, They lose the ability to judge where their feet are. They become wonky, fall over, appear to be blind, walking into things. Now what does that remind you of?

There’s no fool like an old fool, they say, so what happens when a bunch of oul’ coots gather together to make music? The next batch of posts may enlighten you as to the question just posed and may also, perhaps, enrage or entertain. Anything’s better than a yawn, I guess. And everything that is not that bloody virus is a plus. At the moment we can’t meet as a group, as we are in lockdown, so I have set out a version of songs that are in our repertoire but which have not yet been recorded. With any luck (and, as three of us are north of 70, we’ll need it!) we will be able to resume our normal practice of meeting weekly and playing tunes, singing songs and generally enjoying the crack.

I first heard the song in the early 70s from Planxty’s eponymous first album and determined to learn the song, adding an instrumental verse on Spanish guitar. Only last year, I re-visited the song with its instrumental adornment with the group, Banter. Here, though, is a Band-in-a-Box backing track with vocal. Who knows when we will be able to stand in front of a crowd (remember those times?) and do the band treatment of the ballad.

Robert Herrick’s 17^thC poems say life is short, the world is beautiful, love is splendid, and we must use the short time we have to make the most of it. And he wrote that sentiment in lines we still recognise four centuries later: Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, /Old Time is still a-flying; /And this same flower that smiles today/ Tomorrow will be dying.// The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,/ The higher he’s a-getting,/ The sooner will his race be run,/ And nearer he’s to setting. I like to speculate that Ewan McColl was thinking of these lines when he wrote this song.

The Thames is one of the great rivers of the world, even though it is not very long in comparison the big rivers of this earth. It has history, romance, stories and poems galore, not to mention that it flows through London. Several times I have looked down on the bridges and Parliament as I have flown in to one or other of the big airports and never failed but be moved at the sight. Edmund Spenser the Elizabethan poet, in his poem, Prothalamion, ends each of the verses with the line, Sweet Thames flow softly till I end my song. T. S. Eliot, references this line in his modernist masterpiece, The Waste Land. McColl’s song has been covered by many, many artists and it is with great trepidation that I put my cover out there among such company. Anyway, have a listen to my version of Sweet Thames Flow Softly on SoundCloud and see what you think…

There’s no fool like an old fool, they say, so what happens when a bunch of oul’ coots gather together to make music? The next batch of posts may enlighten you as to the question just posed and may also, perhaps, enrage or entertain. Anything’s better than a yawn, I guess. And everything that is not that bloody virus is a plus. At the moment we can’t meet as a group, as we are in lockdown, so I have set out a version of songs that are in our repertoire but which have not yet been recorded. With any luck (and, as three of us are north of 70, we’ll need it!) we will be able to resume our normal practice of meeting weekly and playing tunes, singing songs and generally enjoying the crack.

North and South of the River is a metaphor for the sectarian divide in Ireland which is over 400 years deep and still a factor in the life of that small island washed by the Atlantic waves. The divisions splitting our planet are various: religious, ideological, political, ecological, economic. You, too, can assuredly add to the tally.

Christy Moore wrote this with assistance from Bono and the Edge from U2. I first heard this sung at a club in Western Sydney in the mid-1990s. I took it up at about the same time and, a quarter of a century later, in lockdown, I present it here instead of at the same club, The Penrith Gaels, which is shuttered and, who knows when it will be open for business and live music.

There’s no fool like an old fool, they say, so what happens when a bunch of oul’ coots gather together to make music? The next batch of posts may enlighten you as to the question just posed and may also, perhaps, enrage or entertain. Anything’s better than a yawn, I guess. And everything that is not that bloody virus is a plus. At the moment we can’t meet as a group, as we are in lockdown, so I have set out a version of songs that are in our repertoire but which have not yet been recorded. With any luck (and, as three of us are north of 70, we’ll need it!) we will be able to resume our normal practice of meeting weekly and playing tunes, singing songs and generally enjoying the crack.

Patrick Logan became Commandant of the Moreton Bay penal settlement in 1826. He was hated by the convicts for his harsh methods. He did some exploring and was surveying the Upper Brisbane river when he was killed by Aborigines in 1830. Logan was a relentless flogger as shown in a sample record of his floggings that were noted in the diary of one of the prison clerks. This records that from February to October in 1828 Logan ordered 200 floggings with over 11,000 lashes.

When Logan’s body was brought back to Moreton Bay, the convicts “manifested insane joy at the news of his murder, and sang and hoorayed all night, in defiance of the warders.” Bushranger Ned Kelly used lines from the ballad in his “Jerilderie Letter” in 1879 (“Port McQuarrie Toweringabbie Norfolk island and Emu plains and in those places of tyranny and condemnation many a blooming Irish man rather than subdue to the Saxon yoke were flogged to death and bravely died in servile chains.”)

In 1911, Bushranger Jack Bradshaw printed a version in his True History of the Australian Bushrangers . Bradshaw printed the song again in Twenty Years of Prison Life in the Gaols of NSW attributing it to “poor old Frank McNamara”. Francis MacNamara (Frank the Poet) recited it as he stepped off his convict ship in 1832 at Sydney Cove.

MacNamara was subjected to all the brutality of the convict system in Australia, and was to spend years in various penal settlements. He served time in Port Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land concurrently with John Kelly, Ned Kelly’s father. No doubt it was there that Kelly learnt MacNamara’s ‘The Convict’s Arrival’ or ‘The Convict’s Lament on the Death of Captain Logan’ which we now know as ‘Moreton Bay’. Francis MacNamara wrote many fine poems including ‘The Convict’s Tour of Hell’, ‘The Cyprus Brig’ and one of the many versions of ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’. He used to begin his recitals with the following verse: My name is Frank McNamara\ A native of Cashell Co Tipperary\ Sworn to be a tyrant’s foe\ And while I’ve life I’ll crow! My thanks to folkstream- Australian Folk Songs for the info above.

Moreton Bay borrows the tune of an old Irish air, Eochaill. As Frank the Poet wrote about his convict experience in or shortly after 1830, it precedes by seventy years or so, P. J. McCall’s borrowing of it for his well-known song Boolavogue, which commemorates the campaign of Father John Murphy and his army in County Wexford during the Irish Rebellion of 1798. It was composed in 1898, the centenary of the Rebellion.

The singer in our group, Sam the Man, will probably be irate that I am singing his song, here. However, he’s in lockdown miles away and I’m at a loose end, so…

There’s no fool like an old fool, they say, so what happens when a bunch of oul’ coots gather together to make music? The next batch of posts may enlighten you as to the question just posed and may also, perhaps, enrage or entertain. Anything’s better than a yawn, I guess. And everything that is not that bloody virus is a plus. At the moment we can’t meet as a group, as we are in lockdown, so I have set out a version of songs that are in our repertoire but which have not yet been recorded. With any luck (and, as three of us are north of 70, we’ll need it!) we will be able to resume our normal practice of meeting weekly and playing tunes, singing songs and generally enjoying the crack.

Stephen Foster wrote this in 1856- based on an Irish melody. The song went to England, then, later, to Australia where it acquired these lyrics by Lame Jack Cousens of Springhurst, Victoria, who was a travelling thresher. I first heard this sung by Johnny McEvoy c. 1971 in Co. Cork at my brother Jim’s place. There is a different song of the same name by Tommy Makem which is also worth a listen.

Stephen Foster wrote over 200 songs. Among his best known are Oh! Susanna, Hard Times, Campdown Races, Old Folks at Home, My Old Kentucky Home, Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair, Old Black Joe, and Beautiful Dreamer.

He died early, of fever, at the age of 37. The wowsers of the time were quick with the label, drunkard, but somehow overlooked the quality and quantity of his song-writing. Thirty years after his death, one reporter described him as paying “the penalty of an irregular life, being “weak-willed”, and writing songs about people of “a pathetic character”.

So, you see, he had a lot of detractors, of a mind like that anonymous reporter. And, like that reporter, they are also now unknown nobodies while Stephen Foster lives on in his songs that we, and so many people of good heart, around this wonderful world, SING!

The ways that music and words travel across continents from culture to culture and change to suit the circumstances of the place and time attest to the strength of folk music as a genre. It took fifty years from the time I first heard the song in Co Cork to when I took it up as a part of our repertoire.

Again, this rendering is just a shadow of what a live performance with guitar, fiddle, bodhran, mandolin and voices in chorus can deliver. I am looking forward to the time when, along with the rest of the world, we can meet in convivial groupings in bars and pubs and clubs to enjoy the fellowship of others’ company

There’s no fool like an old fool, they say, so what happens when a bunch of oul’ coots gather together to make music? The next batch of posts may enlighten you as to the question just posed and may also, perhaps, enrage or entertain. Anything’s better than a yawn, I guess. And everything that is not that bloody virus is a plus. At the moment we can’t meet as a group, as we are in lockdown, so I have set out a version of songs that are in our repertoire but which have not yet been recorded. With any luck (and, as three of us are north of 70, we’ll need it!) we will be able to resume our normal practice of meeting weekly and playing tunes, singing songs and generally enjoying the crack.

Rosalita and Jack Campbell was written twenty years ago or so by Sean Mone of Keady, Co Armagh about the terror of drive-bys and targeted assassinations in Belfast in the early 1970s. In it he presents us with a couple who live for country music, (then called country-and-western). Anita sings in a bar and Jack just loves to have a pint and listen to her perform. He channels the ethos of the southwest border territory of the US along the Rio Grande. The songs of Anita and the figurings of his imagination evoke dusty, sunlit vistas populated by Cowboys, Indians and heroic one-on-one gunfights.

One night, after Anita’s performance, they set off homewards and call into their local chippy for a takeaway meal where they entertain the queue by dancing around the joint and singing. This mundane scene transmogrifies to nightmare when “street demons come out to dance”; that is, a sectarian assassination squad in a car, looking for a victim, any victim, cruise by and shoot Jack Campbell dead.

Anita never recovers, spending the dwindling years in her room consuming Prozac and Gin. The song posits a more heartening coda where Rosalita (a.k.a. Anita) and Jack Campbell dance off into the sunset along the Rio Grande.

I first heard the song earlier this year from Christy Moore’s singing. It is far from the first song of his that I’ve covered and it won’t be the last, God willing.

It brought me back to my years in Belfast; first, as a teenager, from 1966 to mid-1968 when I spent weekends going to music venues with my girlfriend (later, wife); then, from late 1968- mid 1972 where I attended St Joseph’s College of Education, known colloquially as Trench House, for a teaching degree. I saw Belfast turn from a vibrant, modern city into a bitter, sectarian battleground in those short years. The descent into hell did not take very long at all.

From late 1969 to mid 1970, I lived in a dingy one-room bedsit near Carlisle Circus at the bottom of the Antrim Road. Across the landing lived a boozy journalist from The Belfast Telegraph who would regale me of tales of the dark doings of British special forces and various loyalist and republican groupings. The stuff he knew curdled my blood, even if he did, perhaps, exaggerate for effect.

In July 1971 I got married and, in 1972, moved into a small house in a lane just off the Whiterock Road with my wife and infant daughter. There, we experienced the increasing violence that internment without trial spawned and witnessed (but mostly heard) skirmishes between the IRA and British forces on that road where we could read, from our upstairs bedroom window, the graffito on the cemetery wall, Is There a Life Before Death? In answer to this question, we left the first setting of our married life for Australia in September 1972.

Hearing the song brought it all back, because, not just ourselves, but just about everybody in Belfast and Northern Ireland has been touched by such a shooting or other instance of violence associated with the “Troubles”. Anyway, here’s the song.

There’s no fool like an old fool, they say, so what happens when a bunch of oul’ coots gather together to make music? The next batch of posts may enlighten you as to the question just posed and may also, perhaps, enrage or entertain. Anything’s better than a yawn, I guess. And everything that is not that bloody virus is a plus. At the moment we can’t meet as a group, as we are in lockdown, so I have set out a version of songs that are in our repertoire but which have not yet been recorded. With any luck (and, as three of us are north of 70, we’ll need it!) we will be able to resume our normal practice of meeting weekly and playing tunes, singing songs and generally enjoying the crack.

It is 1816, a sailing ship limps past Roche’s Point, its rigging all torn. Exhausted mariners, returning after months at sea, perform their duties in desultory fashion but begin to perk up as they round Spike Island and spot the rows of terraces rising above the quay in Cove.

They swarm ashore and make for the places of entertainment for lonely and thirsty sailors in the section of town known as The Holy Ground. Soon they make the rafters roar with their shouts and songs, calling for strong ale and porter as the serving girls move among them, sometimes tumbling into the willing lap of a lusty tar. This is part of a post I published five years ago when the world was a different place.

The Holy Ground exists outside the lusty taverns of 19th Century, Cork. There is sacred ground everywhere, and some, say with the perspective of astronauts looking back at the blue dot from the vastness of space, would characterise all of this earth as holy or sacred ground. That so much of it (to say nothing of the waters around and flowing through it; or the air which passes over it) is despoiled by violence and pollution and injustice makes one wonder if Gaia herself is unleashing pestilence such as SARS-CoV-2 to teach us a salutary lesson.

And so, from lockdown, I present another song that, Deo volente, we, as the group, Banter, will be able to play again in public. These songs are nothing like the real songs which are played in front of crowds enjoying the moment- but, perhaps, it is better than silence.