Donkey riding

                                    Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

The words came unbidden to my mind, ‘Hey ho, away we go, donkey riding, donkey riding.’ I hadn’t heard or sung that song for many years. Maybe it was seeing photographs of my youngest daughter’s family on holiday in France feeding donkeys that lodged in my mind and jogged my memory.

I started wondering about its origins.

‘Were you ever in Quebec,
Loading timber on the deck,
Where there’s a king with a golden crown
Riding on a donkey?’

 

Hey, ho, away we go,
Donkey riding, donkey riding,
Hey, ho, away we go,
Riding on a donkey.’

I seem to remember singing it when I was at school. Why school children in Kent should be singing about far-off Québec was a mystery. We didn’t question what we were taught to sing, just got on with it every Friday afternoon after walking to The Vines and back.

I discovered that it was a sea shanty – that did make sense, living in a Naval area. When I looked at the lyrics online, I found a variety of verses, some of which would definitely not have been taught at school.

I only remember the first verse. There are others, which I probably learnt – about Cape Horn and Cardiff Bay.

The song was a nineteenth-century folk song sung by sailors in Canada as they hauled lumber onto the ships, which then sailed away to distant lands, maybe ‘faraway places with strange sounding names.’ The ‘donkey’ was a steam-driven machine used to load and unload heavy cargo, not a four-legged animal. It was dangerous work, hence, in one version, ‘you’d nearly break your neck,’

The tune was taken from an old Scottish folk song called ‘Highland Laddie.’