There’s a Song for That
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
Do you remember last week I was rambling on about our trip to Ireland? Let me make a brief comment about Belfast. We were there two weeks before the Twelfth of July when Northern Ireland celebrates the victory of William of Orange over King James II of Scotland in 1690. The Battle of the Boyne assured the Protestant Ascendancy and being good Prods they had Union Jacks flying all over the place. When we were there the battle had been over for 323 years and Northern Ireland was still celebrating. No wonder our Catholic bus driver had never been there. Without getting into who was right and who was wrong, isn’t it time for both camps to sit down over a Guinness, a Murphy’s, or a Kilkenny Irish Cream and just let it go?
There is nothing like religion to screw up a good world.
I don’t think I wrote about this in the Packet, but we had a day to kill before our bus tour started and wandered down to the heart of Dublin.
You will be surprised to learn the first place we visited was a pub.
There was a guy sitting all by himself at the bar. For no particular reason he started to sing and before you knew it a half dozen others had joined him. It wasn’t like a sing-a-long where someone gets up and leads the rest in song, it was just some guy who felt like singing and apparently so did everyone else. We stayed a while and had a wonderful afternoon.
The whole experience took me back to the Legion Concert Group in Orillia on show nights. The cast was almost all vets and war-brides, with a few home-grown Canadians thrown in to translate for the locals. If the audience knew the song, and they always did, they just started to sing. It was great fun, but a problem for the next soloist or act standing behind the curtain. They had to wait until the song was over, or worse if it was good night, the series of songs was over before they could go on.
It was during those nights that the intercity rivalry between the cities and towns of the British Isles often took over. It wasn’t like football rivalry where riots break out and trainloads of half-mad fans storm the stadium and beat each other up, it was with pub songs and each crowd tried to out-sing the other.
Brits, Scots and Irish folks can go for hours, especially if the beer is flowing and everyone is in good voice and they always are.
One night in particular stands out in my memory. The show was running late, come to think of it, it ran late every night. Stan Craig, the director, was concerned we were getting close to the Last Call at the bar and said, ‘No encores, period’ and he meant it. (To be honest I don’t remember anyone ever calling the cops to complain about the lateness of the hour. I mean why would they since there was always a few off-duty officers in the crowd who had no intention of demanding the Legion shut down the bar? There was a strange laxness of liquor laws in Orillia back then. I noticed no one ever questioned what Gin Seto was putting in his China teapot in the Shangri-La restaurant at the top of the hill.)
But as I was saying, one night Helen Sears was singing some song or another and when she finished she broke right in to the Northern Lights of Aberdeen. Stan went berserk and ranted about the time, but Helen said her fans demanded it and they did. There was a table-full of Scots from Aberdeen and they wanted to sing, so they did.
It should have ended there, but it didn’t. The ever-popular Billy Reid was on next and not only did he take an encore Billy invited his friends up on the stage. We finished late, very late.
By the way, they never closed the bar.
Billy Reid had the best line in any Legion show ever and I have to tell you about it. I didn’t join the cast until the later 60s, early 70s, but the first show I went to was about the Depression in the 30s and featured the music of that dreadful time in history. Billy’s role was that of the Rev. Holy Moley who ran a soup kitchen to feed the poor.
Someone offered the Reverend Holy some of his own soup. Billy looked in the bowl and said, “I’ll nae eat that crap.”
(Image Supplied)
