Music In Canada

I had finished at George Green’s School and was lucky enough to be awarded a place on the Rhodes Educational Tour to Canada, along with 47 other young men of my age. We were told that as we were crossing the Atlantic by boat, we should offer to create a concert for the other passengers. We should bring musical instruments along for the whole tour. Three chaps brought guitars, and they could play them well. I brought half a dozen kazoos which was about the right level of musical instrument for me.

We played in concert lost of music. We sang (all 48 of us) Gilbert & Sullivan’s “When I was a Lad” and six of us performed Sergeant Pepper with some changes to the lyrics that I wrote. The Scottish lads performed “Wild Rover” and “Wild Mountain Thyme”.

If you put forty eight young men together for five weeks some things will inevitably happen. Lifetime friendships will be formed and the men will sing songs that become themes for the tour. From time to time on a bus or walking along we would burst into “Wild Rover” crack the same catch joke (too racist to mention today). That summer we sang “Four Strong Winds” composed by a Canadian which was one reason for its popularity in Canada, but by no means the old reason. I tried to sing “Whiter Shade of Pale” but sang it not only badly but out of key.

It really does not matter how badly you sing when you sing for yourself. Your ears will forgive you.

Filed under: climate change Tagged: four strong winds, George Green’s School, Sergeant Pepper, singing badly, the wild rover, W H Rhodes Educational Trust Tour to Canada 1967, wild mountain tihyme