Old School songs and did they affect you in any way?

[Deathraystare]

For some reason the same bloody song from school keeps going around in my head. I hated it! Basically it quite angers me! Yes I suppose that sounds hard but it must have stirred some early feminist feelings.

Basically it went "Oh Soldier, Soldier won't you marry me with your musket, fife and drum?" "Oh no sweet maid I cannot marry you for I have no xxx of my own" "So off she goes to her Grandfather's chest and gets him a xxx of the very, very best and the Soldier puts them on".

Of course at the very end after the bastard has sponged off her he tells her he cannot marry her as he has a wife of his own. Everyone else thought this was funny. I did not, I thought it was terrible!

Another song was about "Go and tell Aunt Nancy the old grey goose is dead" this upset me cos I was (still am) soft over animals.

When I needed a neighbour, were you there, were you there?

Puff the Magic Dragon still makes my tummy feel a bit funny even now, and I’m 50!

Also, Streets of London… just re-read the lyrics and things haven’t got any better, probably worse in fact.

@WithMyEncyclopedia

When I needed a neighbour, were you there, were you there?

I was cold, I was naked, were you there, were you there?

(We used to joke that the singer had just got out of the bath)

Catholic school here, so many, many traumatic hymns!

The worst bit about bright eyes was the key we were forced to sing it in.

I had to stop singing puff the magic dragon, the night ds (aged about 6) became hysterical and sobbed uncontrollably at the thought of puff being all alone. We stuck to Tom waits and gram. Parsons at bedtime after that. Much more cheerful

I did go to a wedding with 'all things bright and beautiful' being sung and being pathetically teenage at the 'purple headed mountains'. I blame dh.

I remember singing lots of these! In infants we also sang 'she sat by the lilacs' where 'she' randomly dies and the chap in it is laughing. Bit much for 5 year olds!

[quote Branleuse]When a knight won his spurs

We sang all of these in assembly (I think the entire UK primary system used Come and Praise in the 80s).

But we had the BBC Schools Singing Together programme for music lessons. Contained wildly inappropriate songs like Little Brown Jug, Here Come the Navvies, etc. Plus some random pop songs like Ebony and Ivory and Yellow Submarine. I’m pretty sure that’s where I learned Soldier Soldier too.

Amongst all of the school hymns we sang at the C of E Junior School i cannot understand to this day that amongst the hymns we sang:

'He's football crazy, he's football mad.
His football has taken away the little bit of sense he had
And it would take a dozen servants to wash his clothes and scrub
Since Paul became a member of that terrible football club''

I remain confused. Is this a hymn?

@Changechangychange sorry cross posted with you there. Great minds eh..

'we all swim in a tub of margarine'

i remember that one

@katystar

It's just called Thunder In The Skies by Noel (& Tricia) Richards

@jamandmarmalade

Amongst all of the school hymns we sang at the C of E Junior School i cannot understand to this day that amongst the hymns we sang:

'He's football crazy, he's football mad.
His football has taken away the little bit of sense he had
And it would take a dozen servants to wash his clothes and scrub
Since Paul became a member of that terrible football club''

I remain confused. Is this a hymn?

I remember that one too! We thought it was a weird choice at the time

And London Omnibus, which seemed to be set on a fucking Victorian bus for all the resemblance it bore to any bus we’d ever got on.

As well as several already mentioned, we had:

'At The Name Of Jesus' with the really loud, strong, piano-thumping intro to each verse

'Cauliflowers Fluffy And Cabbages Green'

'If I Were A Butterfly'

'A Child Is Black, A Child Is White'

And that one with the hippos mating

@TheCountessofFitzdotterel

The only version of Puff I can remember is one my friend sang me from his Jewish youth songbook, so as far as I am concerned he lived in Palestine/and frolicked in the synagogue and drank Israeli wine.

There isn’t a sad ending, he gets told off for eating pork but that’s about it.

That is brilliant.

I was at a convent school, so most of the songs were either sickly or doleful hymns — ‘Soul of my saviour,’ ‘Sweet Sacrament Divine’, ‘Flower of the May’, ‘Faith of Our Fathers’, ‘Hail Queen of Heaven’. Anglicanism does better hymns.

And the gasman cometh. Googling, it looks like all of these were by the same two guys (Flanders and Swan) 🤔

My mum always told me that Soldier Soldier was a warning song to girls not to be taken in by paying for things for unreliable men

That bastard Jackie Paper! I hated him, how could he!

My kids school PTA did a fundraiser, where you could go and singalong to Come and Praise, and then have some traditional school dinner puddings afterwards. It was a massive hit! PTA raised lots of money and had to put on another night as they sold out.

@Changechangychange

and ''Mama's little baby loves short'nin' bread''

@Changechangychange

And that one with the hippos mating

@Changechangychange

that's going to bug me all night now...

Mud, mud glorious mud??

and your voice got deeper the more you wallowed in the mud?

Oh god yes! Somebody was on fucking acid when they picked these out.

@Changechangychange the gas man comertb is brilliant. I love Flanders and Swan,

@Leavisite I don't mind Sweet sacrament divine but most RC hymns are dreadful. Completely agree that Anglican hymns are the best. I have the Complete new English hymnal on my phone.

@Leaviste I was at Catholic schools too, up to 1972; we sang hymns galore. Soul of my Saviour is particularly gory, isn't it? "Blood of my Saviour, bathe me in thy tide; wash me, ye waters, gushing from Thy side"! I don't remember being upset by any of them, but now I think some of the words were quite poetic. And Cardinal Newman's Lead kindly light brings a lump to my throat at the end -"And with the dawn those angel faces smile, which I have loved long since, and lost a while" - imagining himself, after death, reunited with erstwhile friends who had shunned him after he converted to Catholicism.

I used to love belting this one out at primary school and was a little obsessed with marrying Jesus as I thought he was the realest and proper man’
And I turned away,
Yes, I turned away,
For I had seen the perfect face
Of a real and proper man:
The man who brought me from the dark
Into light—where life began.

I made my way into the town,
To the busy crowded streets:
The shops and stores and alleyways,
Through the squalor and the heat.
And I saw the faces of men more clearly
Than if I had never been blind:
The lines of envy around their lips
And the greed and the hate

Our leavers song was ‘The way old friends do’ sang in French. We were all in floods and found it very traumatic!