Many of you may have heard that the Boston Red Sox are the World Series champions!
What you might not realize (and here comes the Irish music link) is that there was an accordion and banjo involved in the playing of the National Anthem before the game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN1DC6s7aU4
Good stuff, Al. Congrats to all the Beantown brahmins (from a die-hard Detroit fan). Were you the guy swinging from the traffic light in his underwear?
Ha ha ha, the Drop Kick Murphys …. Never would have imagined they could sing. One thing for sure them Red Sucks earned their title.
:0)
Why is an accordion and a banjo an Irish music link ?
Sounds like the beginning of a riddle Theirlandais.
Congrats Al! The Sox rolled over the Cards like a herd of beginning bodhranistas over a solo whistle player trying to eek out a slip jig.
Regarding the curious obstruction call - can you make that same call in a session for tune jumping? If its obvious you’re about to start a set, and just as you’re inhaling or raising your bow arm to begin, some clod at the end of the row starts a tune instead? A clear case of tune obstruction I should think.
Jusa, Do we need umpires at sessions? If so, what is the musical equivalent to the infield fly rule?
The mind boggles!
The open fly rule? 🙂
Just for accuracy in record keeping (they keep records of everything in sports these days), the guitar seems to have received equal time with the banjo.
Everyone played a part. Music is a team sport, after all…
They made it sound like the pub song it was meant to be.
A few questions for our American session.org members:
Q1. Why do Americans call it “The World Series” when (if I understand it correctly) only north American clubs) take part in it?
Q2. Why did Americans choose an English tune for their national athem (composed by John Stafford Smith, born Gloucester, England)?
Q3. Why do Americans spell “socks” as “sox”?
Q4. Given that this club wanted to have their victory celebrated by singing the American national anthem, why didn’t they pick some good singers to perform it?
Why is this thread here at all?
“Q3. Why do Americans spell ”socks“ as ”sox“?”
That one’s obvious - it saves ink. You don’t have to be American to work that one out.
“That one’s obvious - it saves ink”
Must be more to it that, Creadur. Otherwise they’d be be spelling “locks” as “lox” - and they don’t. At least, not as far as I know, they don’t.
[*“Q3. Why do Americans spell ”socks“ as ”sox“?”*]
Brevity, economy of movement, maybe? Just like ‘l8r’ for ‘later’, or ‘gr8’ from ‘great’, in text-speak.
“Q1. Why do Americans call it ”The World Series" ……
I think I know this one!… It’s named after the newspaper (The World) that first sponsered the series.
Q4. Why are these guys singing. Because these singers, members of a local Irish-American punk rock band, the Dropkick Murphys, are like a musical good luck charm for the club.
Folksinger James Taylor sang for another game, but broke his streak. The previous two times he sang at a World Series game for the Sox, the team won. This time, they lost (but still ended up winning the series).
I never heard of these ‘Drop Kick Murphy’s’, but I like a bit of punk so I must check them out. I don’t like red sox because I always just put on the two firts sox I get hold of, and the red one tends to always clash with the other. I generally hate American spelling except for the word ‘Sox’;- It’s so Anglo Sackson.
The “Sox” spelling is a remnant from a movement in the early 1900s to simplify American English orthography. It was mainly a push to straighten out inconsistencies in the rules of the language, which is what happens when you have Romance/French and Germanic roots and rules intermingling, along with a healthy dose of various other languages and loanwords. As baseball really hit its stride popularity-wise in the early part of the century, it has not one but two teams (the Red Sox and the White Sox) named using those faddish conventions. Americans today would use “socks” in writing.
I’m American and I can’t say I’ve ever seen anyone spell it “sox” outside the context of baseball.
I don’t think that most of the outside world knows this! And socks are such an important thing.
Christopher Selby: “I’m American and I can’t say I’ve ever seen anyone spell it ”sox“ outside the context of baseball”.
What about “bobby soxer”?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_soxer
No answers to Q2. yet!
Q2: The Star-Spangled Banner“ is the national anthem of the United States. The lyrics come from ”Defence of Fort McHenry",[1] a poem written in 1814 by the 35-year-old lawyer and amateur poet, Francis Scott Key, after witnessing the bombardment of Fort McHenry by the British Royal Navy ships in Chesapeake Bay during the Battle of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812.
The poem was set to the tune of a popular British song written by John Stafford Smith for the Anacreontic Society, a men’s social club in London. “The Anacreontic Song” (or “To Anacreon in Heaven”), with various lyrics, was already popular in the United States. Set to Key’s poem and renamed “The Star-Spangled Banner”, it would soon become a well-known American patriotic song. With a range of one and a half octaves, it is known for being difficult to sing. Although the poem has four stanzas, only the first is commonly sung today.
So - long story short, the colonial era Yanks spent a lot of time drinking in the pubs and lacking any original material set the poem to a popular, yet difficult to sing, melody that everybody already knew. Make sense?
Makes sense, but this was past the colonial era. There are many tunes which have found their way around to different words, sometimes wildly different, over the course of their existence. The music to the Star Spangled Banner is just one example.
Really, for a traditional music site this idea should be easy enough to grasp.
The Brits gave us a lot of misery, so we might as well have nicked one of their tunes in consolation.
I’ve spent the last half hour looking for a link to James Morrison’s take on the national anthem,but can’t find it online anywhere. Some of you know what I mean (the best things in life are free)
Could you be looking for the Jimi Hendrix national anthem?? If so
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt3cYpFLJiM
I prefer the Jimi Hendrix rendering. You need to be a reasonably good singer to carry a tune that spans one-and-a-half octaves. And those Dropkick Murphys just don’t cut the mustard.
AlBrown has supplied the best answer to Q2: “The Brits gave us a lot of misery, so we might as well have nicked one of their tunes in consolation”
- Q. But are the Brits receiving the royalties? 😉
I love this version of ’To Anacreon in Heaven":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9LXHrzOVYA
This isn’t the exact version I was looking for but it will do
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNtC_4UksP0
Mix- To be honest, I’ve never heard the term "bobby soxer’ in my entire life!
The Brits did dish out a lot of misery over the years of Empire (and since ….Spice Girls, Simon Cowell and Piers Morgan et al) but the war of 1812 was started by the Americans as they thought the Brits would be otherwise occupied with Napoleon. This was a bit of a mistake as it resulted in a small task force burning down the White House. On the plus side it did however give us the excellent song Battle of New Orleans sung to the tune The 8th of January (1815) which commemorates the end of a war which very few people, certainly on this side of the pond, really know much about.
We do the Battle of New Orleans song, inc last night in fact. The important thing about that battle is that it happened after the war had ended, so it doesn’t count as a British defeat…. 😉
Christopher Selby: “Mix- To be honest, I’ve never heard the term ”bobby soxer’ in my entire life!"
Well, I guess that you just weren’t around in the 1940s … 😉
Odd though that I (being English) knew of the term and you being an American didn’t!
“Christopher Selby: ”Mix- To be honest, I’ve never heard the term “bobby soxer’ in my entire life!”
Well, I guess that you just weren’t around in the 1940s … 😉
Odd though that I (being English) knew of the term and you being an American didn’t!"
Does seem like time rather than geography. I’ve only come across the term (here in the UK) in a 1940’s pilot’s wartime reminiscences, (a fellow from the “Free State” who chose to serve in the RN Fleet Air Arm.)
Bobby soxer refers, I believe, to the women who did the jitterbug dancing in the 40s and jiving in the 50s.
Well I’m not a fan of national anthems, certainly not the English one. But I actually think The Dropkick Murphys do a decent job of this one 🙂
