Emmanuel Pariselle’s romantic song about an old boat: La Nonchalante

I can’t understand more than a few words of this beautiful-sounding little song, but I’m told its about an elderly man and his old boat on the Canal du Midi. The boat’s at the end of its useful life, but somehow her skipper finds it difficult to part with her. I guess many intheboatshed.net readers probably feel much the same way as the chap in the song, as they set off each morning to work on their projects.

I hope you like it as much as we did when we met Emmanuel Pariselle at Melodeons and More, at Mendlesham in Suffolk a couple of years ago – he was teaching a group to make melodeons (he’d call them diatos, btw) and playing in a concert, while we were some way down the bill (there’s a photo to prove it!).

There’s some more of Emmanuel’s lovely music at MySpace, and via Amazon.

For more songs at intheboatshed.net, click here.

PS – It’s taken a while, but a chap called Jack Humphreys has succeeded in creating a credible English language version of this song.

Lowlands away!

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Here’s a ghost story for Halloween – the great old slow sea shanty Lowlands, with an engraving drawn from Van der Velde and photos from Geoffrey Robertshaw.

To find out more about Robertshaw and his fabulous photos of the last days of sail, click here.

For more sea songs from our friends and ourselves, click here.

PS – Like many others, I was astonished to learn that this year’s Turner Prize has been won by a sound sculpture featuring this very song.

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