Tag: John Conolly

Fiddler’s Green

https://soundcloud.com/gmatkin/fiddlers-green

John Conolly’s evergreen Fiddler’s Green seems to have been largely forgotten among folkies (they probably sang it a bit too much decades ago) but it’s still popular with working boat folks including fishermen around the creeks where we keep our little boat. This recording… well, it’s not perfect but I’ve been trying out some new equipment and it seemed a shame to waste this take!

Where is Fiddler’s Green? Who knows, but the Wikipedia tells me it’s a ‘legendary imagined afterlife, where there is perpetual mirth, a fiddle that never stops playing, and dancers who never tire’. It sounds like one of the better folk or maritime festivals, or – as Chris Brady points out in the comments link below, like a fishermen’s do in a Norfolk pub thirty or forty years ago…

The Mainly Norfolk website has a page of information about the song.

PS – Here’s another song for those who enjoy this important aspect of our cultural heritage. This time it’s a story song designed to warn young sailors that there are many false friends offering broad smiles and warm who are only too keen to take their money while it lasts – and will quickly turn them away when it runs out…

Three Score and Ten

By the time this pops up, we’ll likely have been singing this at one of our local pubs, not least as a kind of hymn for those at sea tonight. There will be some who are out there either because it’s their duty, of course, and others because they have somehow got caught in the wrong place. . Great good luck to them all.

By the way, the Yorkshire Garland group have an informative entry for this song on their website – including a reminder that it was Fiddlers Green songwriter John Conolly who found the old broadside ballad in a library, and the astonishing suggestion that the tune is a re-working of Jingle Bells, which was first popular around the time the balled was written.

I gather this report appeared in the Hull Times on the 2nd of March, 1889.

‘As day after day passes and no tidings arrive of the missing Grimsby smacks, it is beginning to be realized that the gale of the 9th will prove one of the most disastrous to the Grimsby fishing trade on record. All together nearly a dozen fishing vessels carrying between 60 and 70 hands are missing.

Most of these vessels were only provisioned for 8 or 9 days and many of them have been out now for over a month. Of the safety of  7 of them all hope has now been abandoned.

Portions of the wreck from the Kitten have now been picked up at sea and brought into port, and the British Workman was seen to be reduced to a mere wreck by a heavy sea on the morning of the gale. Many of the men who have been lost leave wives and families and an immense amount of distress will be caused among the fishing population.

‘The total number of vessels lost will, it is feared, be near 15 and between 70 and 80 lives of men and boys.’