Post Quiz - A Sydney Carter Primer: Answers
Created | Updated Feb 25, 2018
A quiz about a British original.
A Sydney Carter Primer: Answers
If you're British, or a folk fan, you probably guessed some of these answers. Anyway, we hope the quiz helped introduce a songwriter you'd probably like to know better. Here are the answers, with some links to songs.
- Sydney Carter was a Londoner, born in Camden Town. His song for Flanders and Swann called 'Down Below', was about…
- London sewer workers. (You'll recognise the geography.)
- Carter and Donald Swann were old friends. They met in…
- Greece, while driving ambulances. (Pacifists.)
- Sydney Carter wrote a little ditty called 'My Last Cigarette', about a man trying to stop smoking. It was featured on the album called…
- Taking Out the Dustbin. (We like the 'special effects' in this video.)
- Carter wrote two songs that are widely sung in British schools. One of them is 'Lord of the Dance'. The other one is…
- Carter wrote protest songs for the…
- Aldermaston March.
- Carter wrote an eye-opening and controversial religious song called 'Friday Morning'. Bishop Fulton J Sheen drew a radio lesson from it, but there was an outraged call to ban the song from…
- Enoch Powell. (Here's someone singing Friday Morning, in spite of Mr Powell.)
- Carter had a deeply spiritual philosophy, but he wasn't an orthodox religious thinker. A book containing his spiritual ideas had the title…
- The Rock of Doubt.
- Sydney Carter's most famous song is probably 'Lord of the Dance'. He claimed that, among other things, the song was inspired by…
- A figure of Shiva, Lord of the Dance. (It was on his desk. We picked this video version for the comments. A lot of people sang this in primary school, it seems.)
- Carter's song 'To the First of My Lovers' is about…
- The varieties of religious experience. (Listen carefully to the words of To The First of My Lovers. 'The same light can shine in a candle or the sun.')
- Sydney Carter's 80th birthday was celebrated in…
- Westminster Abbey.
Folk music may not be 'your thing', or Flanders and Swann, for that matter. But we bet you've heard his music around. The Editor learned 'Lord of the Dance' in a pub, and later sang it at the Quaker Meeting House…
