Ok, so last night was the annual Superconference Sing-A-Long night. Last year, (it’s 1st year) I ended up leading a number of people in a handfull of sea shanties as part of the evenings music. I don’t know what possesed me to do it, but we had fun and people apparently enjoyed it enough that they asked to do it again this year. So this year, I printed out a few that I was most familliar with so others could more easily join in. (Last year I used the copies I have on my PDA).
This year we had many return faces, and a bunch of new as well. Among the new faces was a couple that when they found out about the shanties got extreemly excited. I anded them the sheet and of course the 1st one they fel in love with was Bold Reily. I can NEVER seem to get that one right, probably becasue I’ve heard it done a million different ways. I said, oh sorry, I’m really bad with getting that one started. The woman said “Oh no problem!” and lead the group off with a fantastic rendition. I chimed in about 1/2 way through the 1st verse and once everyone else found the page they joined in too. It sounded pretty good for a bunch of people completely unfamilliar with each other, and most with no professional music background. (Most) Through the night (we were at it from 8 to after midnight) we did about 5 shanties, a ton of Beatles stuff, some Rocky horror tunes, Elton John, some gospel, some other folkie stuff, and a Disney tune. On the Disney tune we were led by a woman form the Yellow Book conference that was walking by and got in on the act. The Beatles session was led by our piano player and another Yellow book guy.
It turns out the couple are part of a sea shanty group out of CA by the name of “Flash Packet“. They came up to me this morning and made it a point to mention how excited they were to find out there were other people around that enjoyed shanties too. It sounds like they are looking forward to next year, and teh guy who organized the “session” already said he thinks of me as his “co-presenter”. How DO I get myself into these situations.
John's Musings 