When I listen to songs I never really hear the lyric content until someone explains them or I read them. For most probably all my Sixty Three years I have heard Danny Boy been sung by friends and family this is the first time I knew what the lyrics are about.
Bill there are two Waltzing Matilda Songs. The Aussie Folk Song
Waltzing Matilda is Australia's best-known bush ballad, and has been described as the country's "unofficial national anthem".
The title was Australian slang for travelling on foot (waltzing, derived from the German auf der Walz) with one's belongings in a "matilda" (swag) slung over one's back. The song narrates the story of an itinerant worker, or "swagman", making a drink of billy tea at a bush camp and capturing a stray jumbuck (sheep) to eat. When the jumbuck's owner, a squatter (wealthy landowner), and three mounted policemen pursue the swagman for theft, he declares "You'll never take me alive!" and commits suicide by drowning himself in a nearby billabong (watering hole), after which his ghost haunts the site.
The figure of the "jolly swagman", represented most famously in Banjo Paterson's bush poem "Waltzing Matilda", became a folk hero in 19th-century Australia, and is still seen today as a symbol of anti-authoritarian values that Australians considered to be part of the national character.
A swagman (also called a swaggie, sundowner or tussocker) was a transient labourer who travelled by foot from farm to farm carrying his belongings in a Swag (bedroll). The term originated in Australia in the 19th-century and was later used in New Zealand.
The Band Sang Waltzing Matilda is the other Waltzing Matilda song.
And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda is a song written by Scottish-born Australian singer-songwriter Eric Bogle in 1971. Many cover versions of the song have been performed and recorded in differant counteries around the world.
This the other Waltzing Matilda Song is an account of the memories of an old Australian man who, as a youngster had travelled across rural Australia with a swag (the so-called Matilda of the title) and tent. In 1915 he had been recruited into the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and sent to Gallipoli. For ten weary weeks, he kept himself alive as around [him] the corpses piled higher. He recalls that terrible day ... in the hell that they called Suvla Bay [they] were butchered like lambs at the slaughter ... in that mad world of blood, death and fire. He is hit by a shell and awakens in hospital to learn that he has lost both his legs.
When the ship carrying the young soldiers departs from Australia the band plays Waltzing Matilda while crowds wave flags and cheer. When the crippled narrator returns and the legless, the armless, the blind, the insane are carried down the gangway to the same popular music, the people watch in silence and turn their faces away.
I will let the song tell the story below.