An African-American Mardi Gras ‘battle song’, ostensibly in celebration of a medieval European holiday, slighty repurposed by a singer in the Solomon Islands. Truly, we are a global community!
Shrove Tuesday, of course, is the day before Ash Wednesday and the start of Lenten fasting (carne vale, farewell to meat). In the Northern European days when nobody had to look up this year’s lunar calendar, this was the hungry season for everyone — everything green was dead, the autumn stockpiles were running perilously low, the hens had stopped laying, and the beasts kept for next year’s use were getting as thin and peaky as the people. Still a fine excuse for using up the stocks of butter, sugar, eggs, and fancy add-ins with a batch of pancakes or crepes, though!