(10) Peat Bog Soldiers (Cover) - Pat Kelleher - Irish Folksinger/Songwriter

Irish Folksinger Pat Kelleher from Cork, Ireland performs his version of "The Peat Bog Soldiers" in his Folk Music & More Session Series. This is an interesting European protest song covered by Luke Kelly and Pete Seeger to name but a few. Here is some information from Wikipedia. This song was written by prisoners[1] in Nazi moorland labour camps in Lower Saxony, Germany. The sixteen singers, mostly members of the Solinger workers choir, marched in holding spades over the shoulders of their green police uniforms (our prison uniforms at the time). I led the march, in blue overalls, with the handle of a broken spade for a conductor's baton. We sang and by the end of the second verse nearly all of the thousands of prisoners present gave voice to the chorus. With each verse, the chorus became more powerful and, by the end, the SS – who had turned up with their officers – were also singing, apparently because they too thought themselves "peat bog soldiers".
When they got to, ... "No more the peat bog soldiers Will march with our spades to the moor.", the sixteen singers rammed their spades into the ground and marched out of the arena; leaving behind their spades which now had, sticking out of the peat bog, become crosses. In 1933, one camp, Börgermoor, held about 1,000 Socialist and Communist internees. They were banned from singing existing political songs so they wrote and composed their own. The words were written by Johann Esser (a miner) and Wolfgang Langhoff (an actor); the music was composed by Rudi Goguel and was later adapted by Hanns Eisler and Ernst Busch. (September 2019) www.longneckmusic.com