#TradSongTues 13th November - Poppy Songs

This is a series of posts about the #TradSongTues project, run by various people at the University of Sheffield. Every week I've been recording a song for the theme, sharing it and talking about it. Come and play on Twitter!

Usually when I have multiple options for the theme I run a Twitter poll to help decide what song to sing. However, the theme this week lead to two songs that I feel are too important to not sing.

Singing out the Days

This song comes from Chumbawumba's last album ABCDEFG. It's probably the best song on the album by far, and whenever I listen to the album I'll always go back and relisten to that track. It's too good not to. As the liner notes point out, there's a wealth of songs by soldiers that usually criticise the entire war and the fact that the people making the decisions were so far removed from it that it was madness. Especially with how mindless the First World War was in loss of life.

Rose of York

This song was written by Ken Thompson and Leslie Hale, but I learned it from Roy Bailey's album with Leon Rossellson "That's Not The Way It's Got To Be". I nearly fell off my chair because It's a blindingly good song. At some point I should probably look up who Ken and Leslie were, because if they've got anything else half as good as that I want to know. From what I can tell, they wrote this song after reading "Covenant with Death" by John Harris.