Composition
Marion Sinclair was a music teacher at Toorak College, a girls' school in Melbourne she had attended as a boarder. In 1920, she began working with the school's Girl Guides company.
One Sunday morning in 1932, Sinclair had a sudden inspiration in church and dashed home to write down the words to "Kookaburra". In 1934 she entered the song into a competition run by the Girl Guides Association of Victoria, with the rights of the winning song to be sold to raise money for the purchase of a camping ground, eventually chosen as Britannia Park. The song was performed for the first time in 1934 at the annual Jamboree in Frankston, Victoria at which the Baden-Powells, founders of the Scouting and Guiding movements, were present.
Despite its "Aussie-ness", the song is well-known and performed around the world, particularly in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, where the Girl Guide movements in those countries have adopted it as a traditional song.
The Welsh folk song "Wele ti'n eistedd aderyn du?", also known as "Dacw ti yn eistedd, y 'deryn du" (Rough English translation "See you there, that black bird sitting?"), is sung to the same tune as "Kookaburra". This traditional Welsh nonsense poem is much older than the song "Kookaburra", but, similar to a number of Welsh folk songs that originated from Welsh poems that were later sung to other, more well-known tunes – the most famous of these being "Ble Mae Daniel?" ("Where is Daniel?") sung to the tune of "London's Burning" – the poem was adapted to fit the tune "Kookaburra" in the 1960s by the Urdd Gobaith Cymru (The Welsh League of Youth) movement, as the syllables in the Welsh poem are almost identical in pattern to those in "Kookaburra".
The lyrics of the Welsh folk song:
- Dyna ti yn Eistedd y Deryn du
- Brenin y goedwig fawr wyt ti
- Can dere deryn can dere deryn
- Dyna un hardd wyt ti
The English translation of this Welsh poem:
- There you are sitting blackbird
- You are the king of the forest
- Sing bird, come sing bird, come
- What a beauty you are
Read more about this topic: Kookaburra (song)
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“It is my PRIDE, my damn’d, native, unconquerable Pride, that plunges me into Distraction. You must know that 19-20th of my Composition is Pride. I must either live a Slave, a Servant; to have no Will of my own, no Sentiments of my own which I may freely declare as such;Mor DIE—perplexing alternative!”
—Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770)
“At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
“Every thing in his composition was little; and he had all the weaknesses of a little mind, without any of the virtues, or even the vices, of a great one.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)