Brown Owl’s Campfire Songbook

I love campfire singing. If you have even the briefest Guiding contact with me, you’ll probably learn that. I’ve become the go-to person in my district for it and so you’ll find me getting volunteered to lead at Thinking Day and once even hauled out of the audience at a national event, thanks to my Rangers yelling from the front row, and having been employed (but never actually worked!) at the place. About ten years ago I put together my first songbook for my Brownies-at-the-time and I’ve been expanding it ever since.

Campfire singing is a particular joy in Guiding and Scouting. It’s a community thing and I especially love it when I go to a large-scale event with people from all over the country, or even world, and we all know the same songs. Or variants, anyway. Everyone has slightly different words or a slightly different tune, or different actions. I recently read Elinor Brent-Dyer’s The Chalet Girls in Camp, which is about a Guide camp at a girls’ boarding school in Austria. It was published in 1930 and there they are singing songs I recognise and announcing meals with “Come to the cookhouse”. Your kids probably aren’t used to singing in public, except maybe hymns in assembly (do schools still do that?) but eventually the magic of friends, fire and toasted marshmallows will wear them down.

(Do include marshmallows at your campfire. Even if it’s just everyone sitting in your church hall, you can cook them over tealights with a bit of patience.) A campfire circle doesn’t have to be outside with an actual firey campfire. It can just be a circle on the floor or you can make a fire out of cardboard or – my favourite – use floating candles in a washing-up bowl of water.

Your unit will acquire its own favourites which will be yelled for over and over again but it’s always good to add new ones to your repertoire. I scribble down half-notes on my phone at events and then have to come home and piece it back together with the help of the internet to add it to my unit’s songbook.

But it’s intimidating, especially for new leaders. They probably don’t know any songs and leading a group, even of children you know pretty well, in singing takes a particular kind of confidence. There’s very little I can do about the latter problem but this blog exists, in part, to fill the gaps that don’t show up in the ALQ.

So when I was deciding what subject to cover next on this blog, I thought campfire songs was an obvious candidate. I’ve made some adjustments to my unit songbook and I present to you:

Brown Owl’s Campfire Songbook!

It contains 50+ songs (so far) sorted by style, from rude songs, to repeat after me songs, to closing songs. A word of warning: this contains We Are the Red Men, which is an old favourite but a very outdated one full of bad stereotypes. It stays in the book from tradition but we sing it cautiously, never in public and prefaced with a little discussion, depending on age group, about how it’s outdated and inappropriate.

You can download it here for free. I’m not here to gatekeep singing – I’m trying to tear down the gates and bring singing to the units who don’t habitually do it.

Print it yourself, copy it, pass it around – these songs don’t belong to me, I’m not the first person to gather them together for my own use and I’m absolutely not out to make a profit from them. Stick them up on the wall with a projector, even, to save ink.

Yes, ink. It currently runs to 43 pages including cover. Feel free to not print the cover and make your own using your own creativity and felt-tips, I won’t be offended. I’m so far from any good at graphic design that I can’t even use the gRaPhIc DeSiGn Is My PaSsIoN gif.

Getting the tunes across is another matter. One day I’ll update this post with a link to a YouTube playlist and maybe one even I might start recording them myself. In the meantime, maybe you’ve heard some of these songs at events but don’t know them well enough to sing yourself – now you’ve got the words. Maybe you like the sound of some of them – most of them will be on YouTube somewhere. As a rule of thumb, if it’s an American church group performing with a guitar and fixed grins, they’re probably singing a different version to the one British Guides sing around campfires and they’re almost definitely singing it at half the speed. If in doubt, speed it up.