Music
The Tangaloor Set
The Tangaloor Slide (a Chad original) paired with a tune he got from his grandfather for which we don't have a name.
The Game of Cards
Sometimes a card game is just a card game.
Sometimes.
"If ye didnae ken what it meant ye widnae be embarrassed."
Arthur McBride
A merry little Irish song about the Yuletide pleasures of walking on the shore and beating recruiters.
Twa Corbies
Here we see what happens when the Scots get ahold of an English, and romantically unrealistic, song (Three Ravens) about a dead knight. The original melody fell out of the tradition, and the words were treated mainly as poetry until Thurso Berwick joined them to this one (the Breton tune An Alarc'h, or The Swan) in the mid-20th Century.
As I was walking all alane I heard twa corbies makin mane And t'ane untae the tither did say, O Where shall we gang and dine the day, O? Where shall we gang and dine the day? In behind yon old fail dyke I wat there lies a new slain knight And naebody kens that he lies there, O But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair, O, His hawk and his hound and his lady fair. His hound has tae the hunting gane His hawk tae fetch the wild fowl hame His lady's taen anither mate, O So we may mak our dinner sweet, O. We may mak our dinner sweet. Ye'll sit on his white hause-bane And I'll bike out his bonny blue een Wi mony a lock o his gowden hair, O We'll theek our nest when it grows bare, O Theek our nest when it grows bare. Mony's the one for him lies slain But nane shall ken where he has gane O'er his white banes when they are bare, O The wind shall blow forever mair, O, The wind shall blow forever mair....
And a rough translation...
So I'm out walking all by myself (these things never happen when there are witnesses), and I hear two crows kvetching, and the one says to the the other, "Where do you want to go for dinner?"
The other says back, "You see that wall? There's a fresh-killed knight behind it. What's better, nobody knows he's there but his hawk, his dog, and his lady, and they're all long gone. Soup's on!
"Look, you sit on his collarbone while I peck out his eyes, and after dinner we can thatch our nest with his hair; it's time you did something around the house. —You know, a lot of people died for him, but nobody will know what became of him—well, almost nobody, like I said. So anyway, when his bones are bare and white, the wind's going to blow over them forever...."
Notes for the scholarly, the picky, and the obsessed:
Thurso Berwick was born Maurice (also cited as R.M. or Morris) Blythman. Credit for uniting words and tune is sometimes mistakenly given to Ray Fisher, who performed the song but gave credit to Berwick.
The earliest known publication of Twa Corbies was in 1803; it was collected by Cecil Sharpe, who credited it as having been "written down by a lady" for him. Its origin has been estimated as early as the 14th Century; the Oxford Book of English Verse puts it in the 17th.
An Alarc'h appears to have been first recorded in collector Hersart de Villemarque's 1839 Berzaz Breiz. The words that gave the tune its title commemorate Jean de Montfort's return to Brittany in 1379.
