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Dirty Old Town (Pogues)(C)(WORD)
Dirty Old Town (Pogues)(C)(PDF)
Dirty Old Town (Pogues)(G)(WORD)
Dirty Old Town (Pogues)(G)(PDF)
Dirty Old Town (MacColl)(WORD)
Dirty Old Town (MacColl)(PDF)
For BUG Jam, we'll do The Pogues' version EXCEPT that we won't change keys in the instrumentals as they do. In the Intro The Pogues play D G A Bm; and in the Instrumental verse they play C F G Am. The tin flute music posted can be played with the (G) songsheet.
The song was written about Salford, Greater Manchester, England, the city where MacColl was born and brought up. It was originally composed for an interlude to cover an awkward scene change in his 1949 play Landscape with Chimneys, set in a North of England industrial town, but with the growing popularity of folk music the song became a standard. The first verse refers to the Gasworks croft, which was a piece of open land adjacent to the Gasworks, and then speaks of the old canal, which was the Manchester Bolton & Bury Canal.