# Songs from your youth ... which you didn't understand until you were an adult

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/songs-from-your-youth-which-you-didnt-understand-until-you-were-an-adult/735100>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Created:** [October 19, 2015, 4:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/songs-from-your-youth-which-you-didnt-understand-until-you-were-an-adult/735100 "2015-10-19T04:12:05Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 6

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**Author:** ![astorian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ad7895/32.png) [@astorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astorian)\
**Post date:** [December 26, 2015, 4:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/songs-from-your-youth-which-you-didnt-understand-until-you-were-an-adult/735100/101 "2015-12-26T04:46:17Z")

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> [@nearwildheaven](#):
>
> I just looked up the lyrics. I’m assuming they didn’t sing the final 2 or 3 verses?

At the very start of the Dubliners’ version, Ronnie Drew wryly observes “We’re only allowed to sing five of them.”

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**Author:** ![Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slow_moving_vehicle/32/291_2.png) [@Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slow_Moving_Vehicle)\
**Post date:** [December 26, 2015, 7:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/songs-from-your-youth-which-you-didnt-understand-until-you-were-an-adult/735100/102 "2015-12-26T07:23:56Z")

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> [@Lemur866](#):
>
> Maybe someone should revive the old “Gangster Rap or Folk?” thread. Those old folk songs are full of murder, rape, robbery, prison, drinking, objectifying women, glorification of material wealth, and bloody revenge. Makes “Straight out of Compton” look tame.

Yeah, no kidding on the folk songs. A friend of mine gave me a mix tape of Scottish folk songs by Jean Redpath. One of them, “A Wee Bird Cam’ Tae My Apron”, is about a young woman who goes down to the pasture to tend her father’s cattle and encounters a “wee bird”. When her mother and father ask her about the lump under her apron, she tells them it was given her by “the best stay-makar, in the toon./And he’s made me a stomacher [_undergarment_] tae bear up my goon [_gown_]/And he’s rowt it beneath/my apron.”

Didn’t need to translate much of the Scots to figure out what _that_ song was about.

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