Questions and Credits

The aim of this CD is to ensure that songs do not die out. Though some songs deserve to be buried and forgotten (Down at the Station), no good song deserves to be forgotten merely because people didn't have the opportunity to hear them. Songs like Testimony of Patience Kershaw, I ain't marching anymore, and Crow on the Cradle have been in our songbooks for years, and yet so few people know the tunes. Similarly, there are so many great new songs now in the songbooks that people just don't know yet. Song of Choice, Song for Ireland, I want to know it's real, Ordinary Man, Only our Rivers run Free, Span the World, etc. are all superb songs, but rarely get sung around Woodcraft campfires.

This CD is an attempt at collating every song from Woodcraft Songbooks ranging from the original 1d song sheets through to our Camp Fire song books. Though I would love to find recordings and chords of all the songs, there are still many gaps.

This CD represents hundreds of hours work to collate together all of these songs. Loads of copyrights have been infringed, and it would take many more weeks of work to check the copyright on the lyrics, chords and sound files to kick out the ones which we are not allowed to use. Consequently, we are not selling this CD in the hope that should anyone take offence to us using their work like this, they will not prosecute us, but just ask us to remove their work. If however, you would like to donate some money (say, £10) to Birkenhead Woodcraft Folk to help their camp fundraising efforts, we won't stop you (c/o Kevin Lowe, 15 Normanston Road, Oxton, Birkenhead. CH43 5SB)

We decided to infringe these copyrights to give a wider audience to these songs. It is hoped that people will go and buy the original CDs of artists if they like what they hear. I know personally, I have spent a fortune on CDs by Peggy Seeger, Ewan MacColl, Billy Bragg, Leon Rosselson, Phil Ochs, etc. thanks to receiving an illegal copy of a song, and then wanting to buy the entire album.

This CD is still very much work in progress. We are constantly updating chords, new sound files, web pages of songwriters, etc. If you can fill in any of the gaps, or wish to add any helpful notes to a song, then please email Kev@cheerful.com. Likewise, if you want to record a better version of any song and mail it to us, then we will include it in future copies.

Many thanks to everyone that has sung for this CD (whether they knew it or not). The old Woodcraft tapes (hence the extremely bad audio quality), Middlesborough Woodcraft, Birkenhead Woodcraft, Sheffield Socialist Choir, Elspeth Mclean (Liverpool Woodcraft), Linda Osborn (Boveney Woodcraft) and many published artists thanks to the wonders of Audio Galaxy, Overnet, Edonkey and Napster.