Friday, March 27, 2009

Irish songs

The title I chose for my maternal genealogy notes is A Little Bit of Irish. This is in fact the title of a sentimental Irish song that I used to hear on the radio when I was a kid. It was the theme song of a weekly concert, aired of a Sunday evening on the ABC station 2NR, by the Irish tenor Patrick O'Hagan. He's the father of the singer Johnny Logan, nicknamed Mr Eurovision because of his multiple awards, for Ireland, in this famous annual European song contest.

I haven't succeeded in finding a video of Patrick O'Hagan himself singing A Little Bit of Irish [for the moment, I'm awaiting an audio CD I ordered], but here's a version by another singer:


Here we have Patrick O'Hagan (who lived in Australia) singing The Wild Colonial Boy. You can see the same kind of wind-up gramophone we had at Waterview, to listen to 78 vinyl records.


For fuzzy nostalgic reasons, I still adore this corny bushranger ballad. I often sit down at the piano and burst into a rendition of the song for my dog Sophia... who doesn't, unfortunately, seem to be particularly fond of Irish songs. Or would it be my singing that my dog dislikes?

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