Singing
Singing (mostly of English folk songs) has always played an important role in the apres-morris conviviality of the Hong Kong Morris. Jim Carter, Hilary Blythe and Phil Pimentil, three of the side's early members, were noted singers on the local folk scene as part of the group Mulled Ale, and launched a tradition of powerful singing. Several other regular singers have maintained this tradition, including Mary Read and Amy Hughes (romantic ballads), Mike Greenhalgh (sea shanties), Dave Wilmshurst ('Death to the French' songs), Steve Ford (folksong parodies) and Dave Ellis (drinking songs). Kyoko Fukuda has recently widened the side's singing repertoire with two songs sung in Japanese: one about an elephant, known as The Elephant Song, and one about something else, known jokingly as The Not-the-Elephant Song.
Phil Pimentil used to sing one of the few English folksongs known to have mentioned Hong Kong, about an Irish navvy who found work in the British colony in the late nineteenth century: 'I'm off to be a Chinaman, to Hong Kong I'm bound.' Another song with a China connection, The Chinese Bumboatman Song, also known as The Ballad of Wing Chang Loo, has become a side favourite, and is sometimes delivered with 'an horrible oath' (as the song requires) in Cantonese, depending on the company.
Read more about this topic: Hong Kong Morris
Famous quotes containing the word singing:
“The night in prison was novel and interesting enough.... I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“So hills and valleys into singing break;
And though poor stones have neither speech nor tongue,
While active winds and streams both run and speak,
Yet stones are deep in admiration.
Thus praise and prayer here beneath the Sun
Make lesser mornings when the great are done.”
—Henry Vaughan (1622–1695)
“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Song of Solomon 2:10-13.