Irish Pub Ill Take You Home Again Song
The poet Brendan Kennelly once told me that, equally a young man in Kerry in the 1950s, he was occasionally approached by local lads near to emigrate, requesting a short poem referencing their "abode place", a salve to help heal the bouts of homesickness which awaited them in England or America.
The majority of those who left nonetheless sought solace in the many songs attempting to articulate the emigrant experience. Such songs resonated on an emotional level, thereby providing a release for powerful feelings of loneliness and loss, fifty-fifty where the sentiments expressed were sometimes trite and over-simplified. Few in fact were actually written by emigrants, some notable examples fifty-fifty existence penned by non-Irish authors.
I'll Take You Dwelling Again, Kathleen, widely believed to exist an Irish gaelic ballad, was actually written in Indiana by a German-American , Thomas P. Westendorf, for his married woman (she was, in fact, named Jennie). Its perennial appeal for Irish emigrants pining for domicile tin can be readily appreciated.
Another popular ballad, The Mountains of Mourne, was written by Percy French, a songwriter and civil servant who, although Irish, certainly never experienced the trauma of emigration. Nonetheless it remains a shrewd and witty commentary on the values and experience of the rural Irish labourer in London.
Ralph McTell, author of the hugely popular 1970s hit From Clare to Here, is actually an English language folk singer. The recurring theme of homesickness again dictates the sentiment but information technology is set against the authentically gritty background of labouring life on 1960s London building sites, and references the existent-life experience of Irish male person migrant labourers in means the previous examples do not. Equally such it could arguably be called a "work song" of sorts.
The most famous "piece of work vocal" associated with the Irish in British construction, McAlpine'southward Fusiliers, is oft fashionably denigrated as a mere pub carol, and has been washed to death in that environs. Merely this is the one vocal, featuring Irish navvies in Britain, with the almost unimpeachable labour credentials.
Adapted and copyrighted in the 1960s, by Dominic Behan, it originated with a tertiary-generation spailpín from the Mayo-Roscommon edge. Ironically it was actually Sir William McAlpine, of the eponymous structure company Sir Robert McAlpine, who first alerted me to this. On a research mission in the company's Hemel Hempstead headquarters, Sir William ("Neb" to his friends) invited me after a rather well-oiled lunch to join him in a verse or two of the famous anthem.
He interrupted our session to insist that the classic Behan/Dubliners' version, which I was happily singing, was really a derivation of a much earlier song, and quoted other verses in back up of his argument. At that fourth dimension I didn't know enough to dispute this exclamation merely some years later, researching work songs of Irish migrant labour, I met the musician and collector Joe Byrne of Aghamore in East Mayo, who knew the true facts.
Apparently McAlpine's Fusiliers was written by Martin Henry of Rooskey, well-nigh Doocastle in East Mayo, onetime in the tardily 50s. Martin, like other labouring men over several generations in that role of Mayo, had for many years been a spailpín or seasonal harvester in England and once again, like many others, had gravitated into structure in search of better-paid employment.
Information technology was common for such men to write doggerel verse virtually their experiences and sometimes fix this to traditional airs (every bit in many other transmission occupations, such every bit mining and line-fishing), and there are many similar but more than obscure songs known to Irish collectors. I which became very well-known is the stirring spailpín saga, The Rocky Road to Dublin – again, often sung with little understanding of its true context.
Two significant facts which support Joe Byrne's assertion nearly McAlpine'southward Fusiliers are contained in the line: "I stripped to the pare with the Darky Finn manner downward upon the Isle of Grain". The Darky Finn was a neighbour of Martin Henry's who lived in Cloontia, near Doocastle, and his original home still stands. The Island of Grain, as readers of my book The Men Who Built Britain volition know, witnessed the structure over nearly a decade of an oil concluding, refinery, and power station betwixt the late 50s and early on 60s.
We close our evidence with The Tunnel Tigers, written by Ewan MacColl. MacColl is arguably the greatest 20th century celebrant of the working class, but in this song, like Percy French and others before him, he takes liberties with the facts - lyrically evoking an unlikely litany of counties whence young men have gone "driving a tunnel through the London dirt". In fact, Donegal is the dominant producer of Irish tunnellers, with a sprinkling of other counties - mostly on the western seaboard, contributing.
This great song reminds audiences of the legacy of the Irish Navvy – not alone tunnels, dams, motorways and metro systems around the world, merely also the homes and holdings held together, and siblings schooled and clothed, in hard times here, by those thousands who left reluctantly with niggling but made their style against all odds and sent their coin home.
How many left with this edgeless message, from another old emigration ballad, ringing in their ears? "Goodbye, Johnny dear, and transport me all ye can..."
Ultan Cowley is an Irish historian, a onetime emigrant, and author of The Men Who Congenital Britain, Paddy and the Big Ditch, and McAlpine's Men.
Forth with musician Joe Giltrap, he will explore the legacy of the Irish navvy in postal service-state of war United kingdom through stories and song at Ballsy The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin on February 8th at 5.30pm. Tickets toll €5 and are available at eventbrite.com.
Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/abroad/the-emigrant-songs-sung-by-the-irish-men-who-built-britain-1.3372198
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