A dream for another day

I'm playing catch up on my 30 day challenge and going back through some drafts that I hadn't published I found this one.

I had wanted to share this picture that a friend of mine painted - it links in to a song I wrote called Dreaming back in the mid 90s before the ceasefires here ....

It won a song contest and one prominent politician when he heard it, commented "That'll split the camp!"  This is the story of it  - you can also hear the song there.

Colum McEvoy - a wonderful artist who hails from Rostrevor  - painted this representation of the first verse of the song ...

"I saw the devil, he was running after me

Past the Madonna who was happy just to be

in a room that was falling around her with thunder

that was coming from the floor not above like it should be

and when I looked around the door I just come running through was gone

and I awoke to find myself in the middle of this song

I'd been dreaming."

Colum illustrates books and his work has been exhibited across the world.   I love this picture - one day I might own the original.  

This is my  Day 14 blog of a 30 day blog challenge 

D is for Dreams

This is D Day, Day 4 of the A to Z Blog Challenge.

I love dreams - I'm not always a great sleeper, but when I do, my dreams are like movies and a lot of them stay with me throughout the next day.    I keep hearing stories about songwriters who get a full song in a dream but unfortunately that has never happened to me.    However this is a song that I wrote from dreams I had back in 1994 in the middle of a tour in Germany and before the ceasefires here at home.

Click here to listen to Dreaming

Things were very bad in Northern Ireland at the time  .... Everytime Tom and I headed away on a tour we both had been feeling that we didn't want to go back again.   But at the same time while we were away I was incredibly homesick.

We were staying in a remote part of East Germany, by the side of a huge forest, where nobody spoke any English, and while I loved the place, I still couldn't settle.   Every morning I woke up feeling a compulsion to get back to Ireland as quickly as possible.

One night I dreamed a very vivid dream and our host suggested I write it down into a song ... The first 5 lines are exactly what I dreamt.

"I saw the devil, he was running after me
Past the Madonna who was happy just to be
In a room that was falling around her with thunder
That was coming from the floor not above as it should be
But when i turned around the door I'd just come running through was gone
And I awoke to find myself in the middle of this song
I'd been dreaming"

On the following two nights I had more dreams - I was very taken by the strength of the East German people who had stood up for themselves and brought about the collapse of the Wall.  We were doing Q&A workshops for school kids studying English and we couldn't answer all their questions about the workings of life here.

Then I saw the women from the Eastern world come walking
'cross the desert from their homeland in the search for something better
And my answers to their questions didn't measure to their strength
And someone murdered someone and the money'd all been spent
And the cause they'd all been working for got swallowed in the greed
And I thought about these women and their struggle to be free
While I'd been dreaming.

Chorus:

  Only dreaming, I'd been dreaming

  Dreaming, only dreaming

  And I thought about these women and their struggle to be free

  While I'd been dreaming.

After all - at home we were all just the same, worshipping different named Gods but otherwise the same.

Then I saw a building with three women in the scene

One threw a bomb and the second one she screamed

As she pulled through the broken body of her child from the chaos

To the third dressed in green in the uniform of order

And as I calmly watched I suddenly could see

That they all looked the same and they all looked like me

But I'd been dreaming

  Chorus:

  Only dreaming, I'd been dreaming

  Dreaming, only dreaming

  And as I calmly watched I suddenly could see

  That they all looked the same and they all looked like me

  But I'd been dreaming

I didn't feel we were able to speak out at home and was feeling the effects of living under the stress of constant fear for so many years.   

Well do you wonder what it means?

All these pictures in my dreams

All the yearning and the fears

And all the terror and the screams

Well I can still feel the devil round the corner of my memory

And he's waiting for a woman who won't stand up and be counted

And I'm sure there's others like me

Afraid to have their say

Simply sitting back and hoping that it all will be ok

But that's just dreaming.

  We're just dreaming, only dreaming

  Dreaming, only dreaming

  And I'm sure there's others like me

  Afraid to have their say

  Simply sitting back and hoping that it all will be ok

  But that's just dreaming.

We've been back to Germany many times since and I still love the country.  I've never been homesick again, but I've never had another song that came in a dream.

I hope you like the song .... I'd be very interested to hear your comments.  How have dreams affected your work?   Do you get any inspiration from them?   How do you remember them?

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Tuesday Songs

You don't see many great songs about Tuesdays ... Ruby Tuesday is the first one I can think of .... but that's about a person .... Mondays inspire a lot of things - anger, excitement, anguish, doom and gloom, the start of a diet ... but Tuesdays are just in the middle.

So I went searching  ..... here's the songs I could find about Tuesday .... I started off having a real laugh .... the David Bowie one is ridiculous. (and this from a real Bowie fan!!!) ... but then I a few gems followed .... Cat Stevens, Stevie Wonder  and Counting Crows really stood out for me ... and of course Ruby Tuesday ... in fact I probably like Marianne Faithful's version of it better than the Stones, so I've added it in at the end ....

Enjoy!!

David Bowie - Love You Til Tuesday  ( this must have been a precursor for the Laughing Gnome!! )
The Pogues - Tuesday Morning
Rolling Stones - Ruby Tuesday (live) - I want Mick's jacket!
The Moody Blues - Tuesday Afternoon
Cat Stevens - Tuesday's Dead
Lynyrd Skynyrd - Tuesday's Gone
Stevie Wonder - Tuesday Heartbreak
Counting Crows - On a Tuesday in Amsterdam Long Ago
Count Basie - Tuesday at Ten
T Bone Walker - They Call it Stormy Monday (But Tuesday's Just as Bad)  ( had to sneak that in)
Michelle Branch - Tuesday Morning
Marianne Faithful - Ruby Tuesday  (with a gorgeous wee film featuring Catherine Deneuve)



I hope you're having a great Tuesday :)

Day 13 of Effy's Blogalong Challenge

If I Were A Blackbird - the start of a journey

I was standing in the middle of the floor at a singaround  during the  Holmfirth Folk Festival  back in the mid 90s - Tom and I had just met a bunch of lovely Yorkshire singers and I was blown away by the concept of the singaround which was something that I'd never encountered before.  I sang "If I Were A Blackbird" and afterwards Maggie Boyle told me that it was a Delia Murphy song.  I'd only vaguely heard of Delia before that, but I'm fascinated by the story of songs so I started researching her and storing away the bits of useless information that I found.

Fast forward a few years to the Tron Folk Club in Edinburgh and I met Alex Burns - sadly Alex is no longer with us - but that chance encounter changed my life in ways that I couldn't see at the time.  I sang "The Connemara Shore" and asked the audience if any of them had ever come across it before.  Alex thought he had it in his collection of gramophone records and several months later a cassette recording of a selection of his gramophone collection landed on my doormat.  And there, was my proper introduction to Delia and her songs.   

All of a sudden my lonely "If I Were A Blackbird" - or is it If I Was A Blackbird"? had a home and I could remember all the dozens of songs that my mother sang that inevitably were way too uncool for a teenager so I'd filed them in the "not worth considering if you want to be Linda Ronstadt" category...!!

The song became the first one I recorded when I decided to do an album of songs from my childhood in 2004 - it was also the first one that Delia recorded in her very first recording session in 1936.  She was the wife of the Irish minister in London and in diplomatic circles she was mixing with the arts and cultural leaders as well as politicians and diplomats.  John McCormack was a friend of hers as was Margaret Burke Sheridan and when the denizens of the recording industry starting looking outwards from London to find suitable projects to record someone suggested Delia - she was the life and soul of the embassy parties, playing piano and leading singsongs with her vast repertoire of Mayo songs.  So she went in for her very first session in 1936 and recorded 6 songs and became the first Irish person, male or female, to be recorded singing in her own accent, a fact that makes her recordings the beginnings of Irish folk music as we know it from these islands and an early native addition to the work being recorded in America by the McNulty Family and Flanagan Brothers among others.  

In our house we sang If I Was A Blackbird - probably our colloquialisation of the correct grammar - nowadays I find it difficult to be proper and sing "were" .. but here are the words as I sing them.  I also sing the chorus after each verse.   I've read somewhere that the song dates back to the 1700s and there are various theories as to who the Blackbird is or was - some say it was Bonny Prince Charlie as he was sometimes referred to in this way.  However most often it is considered a Dublin street song and started appearing in books from the 1920s onward.  There are interesting discussions about it at Mudcat

If I Were A Blackbird (traditional)

recorded by me on the Songbirds CD  (Glenshee Music GSR001) - available from CD Baby or my shop at www.filcampbell.com

If I was a blackbird, I’d whistle and sing

And I’d follow the ship that my true love sailed in

And on the top rigging I’d there build my nest

And I’d pillow my head on his lily white breast

I am a young maiden and my story is sad

For once I was courted by a brave sailor lad

He courted me truly by night and by day

But now he has left me and gone far away

He promised to take me to Donnybrook Fair

To buy me red ribbon to tie up my hair

And when he returns I will greet him with joy

And I’ll take to my bosom my dear sailor boy

His parents they chide and will not agree

That I and my sailor boy married should be

But when he returns from the ocean so wide

He’ll take me and make me his own loving bride

If I was a blackbird, I’d whistle and sing

And I’d follow the ship that my true love sailed in

And on the top rigging I’d there build my nest

And I’d pillow my head on his lily white breast