A Ducky Recollection

I posted this photo a few weeks ago, but when I looked at it again, I got a bit lost in an old song and memory.

Specifically I was reminded of the song where Mrs Bond invites her ducks for dinner, so to speak. I found the lyrics here (where you can get all of the verses) and a few other places, but here is the first stanza.

Oh, what have you got for dinner, Mrs. Bond?
There's beef in the larder, and ducks in the pond;
Dilly, dilly, dilly, dilly, come to be killed,
For you must be stuffed and my customers filled!

What I hadn't known is that it is a nursery rhyme, for I only knew it as a song. It is a song that I have only heard from one group, The Travellers, and that goes back to the late fifties when they appeared on Country Hoedown, a weekly, Canadian, music tv program.

In The Travellers' version of my youth, the ducklings not only refused the invitation to dinner but sang so back to her. Unfortunately, the lyrics that I found online didn't have the ducks talking back to Mrs Bond.

I think The Travellers' most well known tune was their Canadianized version of Woody Guthrie's, This Land is Your Land. Indeed, at a youth camp in northern Michigan, long long ago, we Canadian campers sang it for the mostly American attendees..

Diving deep into my blog archives, I found where I first posted about The Travellers way way back in 2008. At that time, it was a song, Black Fly, that was performed at Celtfest that stirred my memory because that song was on the LP that I once had, along with Mrs Bonds Ducks and This Land is Your Land.

I could only find one of their songs on YT, and I can't remember whether it was on my LP or not, but I think not. As old as the video is, I think this assortment of performers came after the band members that I would have recognized, or at least some of them are new to me. Actually, it is not a video as such but a recording with just the record cover as the visual.

The Canadian Encyclopedia has a fulsome entry, of which this is the introduction.

Active from 1953 to the 2000s, folk music group The Travellers were icons of Canada’s folk music revival. The first folk group signed by Columbia Records of Canada, The Travellers were best known for the patriotic enthusiasm of their Canadian lyrics for Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” The group influenced many in the folk music movement of the 1960s and 1970s and helped spread the messages of left-leaning social movements such as the labour rights movement. They made many popular recordings and often appeared on television and in concert, across Canada and internationally.

Speaking of The Travellers, I seem to be doing some time travelling these days as this is the third tune that has recently bobbed to the surface of my consciousness. The others were the very recent Sneeze post and Pasquale in the Band from November. Actually, many old tunes surface and more often than not from my religious upbringing, but I don't usually post about them.