Tuesday, March 21, 2006
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Whistling Dixie
In the big city, it's quite uncommon to come across someone whistling a cheery tune. So it was quite a surprise this weekend when we were riding on the upper deck of a #253 bus, and happened to hear a very familiar tune not typically associated with London. Someone on the lower deck of the bus was whistling the classic American folk song"Turkey in the Straw"*. When we exited I looked around for someone meeting my mental image of "someone likely to whistle 'Turkey in the Straw'" (perhaps a barefoot rube clad in overhauls [sic] and maybe even a straw hat, perhaps a Civil War veteran, perhaps one of those modern folk revivalists**) but there was no such person in sight. As it turned out, the mystery whistler was the bus driver. Quite a change from the usual surly-driver experience (although he did have a heavy foot on the brakes).

*a tune that is occasionally played by British ice-cream vans for some odd reason.

**The song has moved quite far from the performance style that originally popularized it in the early 19th century: blackface minstrel shows. Thank goodness.

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Tuesday, March 21, 2006 12:20:01 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  |  Related posts:
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