Saturday 16 May 2009

Blenheim article

Fraxinus on his blog has a nice article on wargaming Blenheim - and he along the way invents a word that I like - 'tricornitis' - I've been suffering an attack of this recently, and for that I apologise. He also quotes the lyrics to the song Rochester Recruiting Sergeant which is an interesting case in that it was written by modern folk musicians Strawhead and has gradually slipped into the consciousness of reenactors and folkies as an original folk song. If you want to read about this bizarre mix-up check out the Strawhead wiki entry. It reads
Strawhead fueled some controversy when it made a derivate work from an old ballad entitled The Bold Fusilier.[8] The Bold Fusilier is a British song in which some argue predates the 1903 tune to Waltzing Matilda.[9][10] Waltzing Matilda is Australia's most widely known folk song, and has been referred to as 'the unofficial national anthem of Australia.[11] There are similarities between Waltzing Matilda and The Bold Fusilier, making for argument that one of the songs is based on the other song.[12] There is no evidence that The Bold Fusilier is older than Waltzing Matilda and Australia and most sources reject the idea that a British song serves as a parent work for the Australian Waltzing Matilda.[13]
In the 1970s, Strawhead wrote four more verses for The Bold Fusilier and called their resulting song, The Rochester Recruiting Sergeant.[8] The Rochester Recruiting Sergeant was adopted by a generation of folkies and battle re-enactors.[8] The four additional verses called to mind the Marlborough's Wars of 1702 to 1713.[8] In addition, the Strawhead creation sounded so like a relic of Marlborough's wars that many of the folkies and battle re-enactors came to believe that Strawhead's The Rochester Recruiting Sergeant was from the early 1700s.[8] As a result, folkies and battle re-enactors came to mistakenly believe that the 1903 tune of Waltzing Matilda was borrowed from the 1970s The Rochester Recruiting Sergeant, rather than the reverse, even though the sleeve notes to Strawhead's 1978 record features an explanation of how they developed the The Rochester Recruiting Sergeant.[8]

1 comment:

andygamer said...

Here's a link to a blog quoting a brief article by Mark Steyn about the Marlburian song and Waltzing Matilda that you might like to read:
http://tinyurl.com/qywhp3
Enjoy!