The Mushroom Blues

2 years ago
21

As well as being a fabulous singer in the Scots tradition, Fiona Ross also takes incredibly beautiful photos of mushrooms and posts them on
her Instagram account @fungi_fee. Fiona's website here:
https://fionaross.com.au/

I mentioned that these photos should be put to a ballad, and then dug up this one about mushrooms from 1780:
http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/view/edition/11020

It is supposed to be sung to the Morris tune 'Black Joak/Joke', which I have tried to manufacture a rough approximation of ( I won't link to the one with words because it is very naughty indeed):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LDU0uealNY

Fascinatingly, the whole song is not about Mushrooms, but about voting inconsistencies and corruption during the Coventry election in 1870,
'mushrooms' was the name for voters brought in to shore up numbers.

If you have access, you can read a whole paper on the subject here:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40859076

I thought this was quite topical, as we are in the middle of an election campaign here in Australia.

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