A grand night for singing

Sometimes when it gets late and it's warm out, which it sort of was today, I get thinking about the picnics I used to go on with my family when I was a kid, and the songs we used to sing on our way home.

There was "Goodnight Irene." When I got into my blues phase much later, my dad liked the idea of Leadbelly because I told him Leadbelly wrote "Goodnight Irene."

In Girl Scouts we learned a song that went, "There's a web like a spider's web/Made of silver light and shadow/Spun by the moon in my room at night..." Holy cow, every song is on YouTube!



Ha, ha! Another song from Girl Scouts, I can't believe I found it.



Once my friend Susan Martin at work, she has the desk next to me, she needed a camp song for a column she was writing, and I burst into "Merry Mac's mother's making Merry Mac marry me ..." They sing it "father" in the video but we sang "mother."

My dad -- come to think of it my dad was usually in charge of the singing -- also loved "I Know Where I'm Going." Gee, what were we, Irish and didn't know it?

It was in this beautiful old movie.



Because of this movie I used to sing this song with Leonard Pennario. I think I will always think of him, the rest of my life, when I hear this song.

When it got really late my dad would lead us in singing "Show Me the Way To Go Home." To my astonishment I found this song on Wikipedia.

And on YouTube. Who would have guessed it?

That is a good group! They are the Hunger Mountain Boys! Listening to the song makes me laugh. Here we were, 6 or 7 years old, and we'd be wailing, "I had a little drink about an hour ago/And it went right to my head!"

I worry now that kids do not sing songs.

But we sure did!