All over Italy they know his concertina/Poppa Piccolino, Poppa Piccolino/He plays so prettily to every signorina/Poppa Piccolina from sunny Italy.
Take me back to Constantinople/No, you can’t go back to Constantinople/Now it’s Istanbul not Constantinople/Why did Constantinople get the works?/That’s nobody’s business but the Turks.
I sailed up the Skagerrak/And sailed down the Kattegat/Through the harbour and up to the quay/And there she stands waiting for me/With a welcome so warm and so gay/Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen.
On the baby’s knuckle, on the baby’s knee/where will the baby’s dimple be? /If it’s always covered by the safety-pin/where will the dimple be?
I do not know what fate awaits me/I only know I must be brave/For I must face a man who hates me/Or lie a coward/A cravin’ coward/Or lie a coward in my grave.
A man with so many notches on his gun/Everyone admired the fearless stranger/Danger was this man’s specialty/So they never bossed nor double-crossed/The Man from Laramie.
Champion the Wonder Horse/Champion the Wonder Horse/Like a streak of lightnin’ flashin’ cross the sky…/The time will come whe everyone will know the name of/Champion the Wonder Horse.
One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock rock/Five, six, seven o’clock, eight o’ clock rock…/We’re gonna rock, rock, rock till broad daylight/We’re gonna rock, gonna rock aound the clock tonight.
In the music charts, 1953 1954 1955. Songs evoking faraway places at a time when foreign travel was next to impossible, baby boom novelty songs, songs from Westerns, imaginary or not. (Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger stay at Glasgow’s Grand Central Station Hotel!)
Then there were the songs, the surprisingly small number of songs, sung on the bus returning from Sunday school outings or from class trips on which I went with my mother when she was a student teacher. (Trips that combined views of the natural sublime with the utilitarian, Loch Katrine and Glasgow’s waterworks presented as 8th Wonder of the World.) I suppose there was only a limited number of songs of which the boys and girls could be expected to know the words or in which they could join in. The singing was always initiated by the teachers or Sunday school leaders when the return leg of the journey was already half over, in the shadow of the hills around Glasgow, so to speak, home metaphorically in sight. The children were to be delivered to their parents in cheerful mood, all squabbles and bad behaviour forgiven and forgotten. Everyone had a good time! children and teachers alike.
And they would sing:
She’ll be coming round the mountain/When she comes (Toot, toot!)/She’ll be comin round the mountain/When she comes (Toot,toot!) Singing ay-ay yipee yipee-ay/ay-ay yipee yipee-ay/singing ay-ay yipee, ay-ay yipee/ay-ay yippee yipee-ay.
Oh the Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen/Seem home sweet home to me/The Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen/Are what I long to see.
Oh ye’ll take the high road and/I’ll take the low road/And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye/But me and my true love/Will never meet again/On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.
And the inevitable ‘I belong to Glasgow’ in all its fake egalitarianism. And if it was a Sunday school trip, even the church elder or two present (but young people, you understand) would join in, just to show (others, themselves) that they weren’t snobs, oh no.
I belong to Glasgow/Dear old Glasgow town…/I’m only a common old working chap/As anyone here can see/But, when I get a couple of drinks on a Saturday/Glasgow belongs to me!
My mother and me would be sitting on facing banquettes at the rear of the bus along with a couple of the particularly naughty children kept apart from the rest and she would nudge me to join in the singing, but I couldn’t, not really, and I sat there, a foreign body, barely mouthing some words, sat there like a stookie, as my father would probably have put it, but at least he never came on such a trip anyway.
It was a world before rock ’n’ roll, on the brink of rock ‘n’ roll, worlds and less than ten years before the Beatles, worlds before James Brown, before Folk and Protest, before Bob Dylan, worlds before Cream and Led Zeppelin, before Disco, before Punk and Rap, before the DJ saved my life before House Music all night long, before dance clubs became a big as the biggest dance halls had ever been.
A world in which for many people the quickest way to see moving pictures of the Coronation was to wait for the (colour!) film of the occasion that was distributed to cinemas a week after the event. We went, of course, saw the raindrops on the carriage pane in front of the pale face under the crown, the slowly waving hand. The Anniesland Odeon was packed. To my mother, Elizabeth was at once the professional woman carrying out her duties flawlessly, and at the same time, as monarch, an embodiment of continuity and stability, a guarantee that her second life would not be destroyed as the first had been.
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