The other day I stumbled over a version of Eric Bogle’s extraordinary song about visiting a WW1 cemetary. The song’s known variously as Green Fields of France or No Man’s Land. This version is from a live recording made on what I gather was an annual travelling ‘folk’ package tour to Germany in the early eighties.
There have been a lot of versions of Green Fields over the years, but this one features Alex Campbell and german folksinger named Hannes Wader dueting over Finbar Furey’s Uilleann pipe drones. Wader sings a verse in english and then switches to german for the rest of the song. The concept’s kind of hokey, but I found it deeply moving all the same: despite the 16 million dead, here was a scotsman and a german singing in germany of the four years a generation of each spent consigning each other to horrendous deaths in a sea of mud.
Various Artists - Folk Friends 2 - 1981
http://rapidshare.com/files/267920095/FolFri-FolFri2.rar
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