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In my youth when I’d be going to parties alongside, what we then called ‘musos’ – i.e. folk who were in a band – and a singalong got going, it might include something from the charts or even a Broadway musical tune.
My party piece though was always the Jute Mill Song, ‘Oh Dear Me’ by Mary Brooksbank, a song that attested to her gruelling life working in the Jute mills of Dundee, which I knew diddly squat about but sang as if I’d been; ‘Shiftin bobbins, coorse and fine’, for a lifetime!
I blame the job I had as a teenager; working for The International Folk Festival, where I was taught to sing it at the top of my lungs, that and all manner of marching songs. I soon learned you...