#TradSongTues 23rd October - Political 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!

Another poll for this week, because it turns out I have loads of political songs:

Meadows at Fred was the winner, which was Fields of Athenry.

This song was written by Pete St John. I didn't realise how political a song it was until a few years ago when I learned more about the Irish Potato famine and how Trevelyan's corn is a reference to Charles Edward Trevelyan who said "the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson". Of course I originally wrote "I lost my love" as a potato famine song, but I didn't do enough research to connect the dots apparently.

I first learned this through the celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys, which was my initial introduction into punk. I've known this song since ~2006 long before I became a folkie. I even sang this at High School. I did a piano arrangement that mirrored the Dropkick Murphys' punk version.

The songs in the poll were:

Matthew's song
The Digger's song - Matthew is my nephew who loves diggers
Rainbows
One that I wrote called Colours about how I felt paralysed at the 2015 election
Not intersect of children
Union Miners. It's a funny programmer's joke. Honest

There's currently no recording of Colours, but if you want the words they're available here