SCC Field Diary - Day One

SCC TRIP ONE - Day one Mon 13th August, 2012
London to Oxfordshire to Herefordshire
Sam Lee, Becky Lee and James McDonald

Photo: A Perseid meteor lights up as it streaks through the Earth's atmosphere, as seen and photographed by Ron Garan while aboard the International Space Station on August 13, 2011. Copyright: NASA (Public Domain)

After a night of celebrating British popular music at the London Olympics closing ceremony, I purged myself of recent, fleeting tunes with a spot of star-gazing in the middle of Clapham Common, my local park. The annual meteor shower called the Perseids (so called as they appear in the north east of the sky near the Perseus constellation) had come to town again. Despite the light pollution all around my friend and I as we lay on the grass, we must have seen a dozen meteors burning up as they collided with our atmosphere overhead.This experience of silently staring into the vastness of space in the company of a friend was a suitable way to transition from London life to what I was about to do the following day: Monday the 13^th of August 2012 was the nominally first day of collecting for the Song Collectors Collective. This first trip, as I have explained in my previous blog post, has been supported by the Irish Arts Council and focuses on collecting songs from Irish Travellers.

I arrived into Oxford station in the afternoon and met with Sam Lee and his sister Becky who had been at a music festival at which Sam and his band were performing at the weekend. Though Sam and I have quite a few leads for people to meet up with across Britain and Ireland, indeed we’ve already met with quite a few of them in the past, it was a new path of investigation that we began with.

Sam’s sister Becky was an amateur boxer when she lived in Oxford. As we were in the area, and Irish Travellers have an (in)famous affinity and acknowledged skill at boxing (attested by a recent Olympic silver medal won by bantamweight John Joe Nevin), we decided to make enquiries through her former boxing coach. Zar, a head-teacher at a local primarily school, who knows of a few Traveller sites through both his work and through his involvement with the sport. He recommended a nearby site for us to visit and when we arrived there we spoke with a few young men from the Joyce family who, unsurprisingly, were much more interested in talking about boxing than songs, but they recommended that we visit a woman called Ellie in another camp nearby who they said was a good singer.

When we arrived at Ellie’s trailer, the three of us were welcomed in and we talked for a while about what we were doing, the songs we were interested in and the singing amongst the Travellers. All the while we chatted, Ellie, aged 72, sat upright in a comfortable reclinable chair, while Sam, Becky and I and some of Ellie’s family sat around her on the cushioned window-side seat. As we began to enquire about what songs Ellie knew and where she had learnt them from, she assured us that her singing days were long over and she couldn’t remember the old songs. When Sam suggested the names of certain songs, she said that she did indeed know of the songs, maybe even used to sing them years ago, but they was since forgotten. But a cup of tea later and Ellie was reciting verses of one of the old songs, hesitantly at first but then with the flow and sensitivity of a bard, letting the poetry paint a picture in the minds of each listener. We all fell silent and watched the story play out like a movie in our minds. A couple of verses in, Ellie couldn’t recall the next line so started the verse again, this time singing it to help her remember. What we heard was the delicate, measured voice of a consummate tradition bearer. The song was Shanagolden, which Ellie explained is the story that so often is expressed in Irish song: the loss of a loved one as a consequence of oppression from the ‘Saxon stranger’:

‘Then came the call to arms, love, the heather was aflame 
And from the silent mountains, the Saxon strangers came. 
I held you in my arms love, your blood ran free and bright,
In the fields by Shanagolden, on a lonely summer's night.’

This song was written by Sean McCarthy, the Bard of Finuge (Co. Kerry), in the 20^th century, but has the timelessness of a traditional ballad. And it was with a few more timeless songs from the tradition that Ellie was to treat us that afternoon: her versions of The Bold Trooper, The Jolly Thresherman, and The Barley Straw or The Wheaten Straw (Roud 118, Child 279) as she has it; a song traced back to the court of James V of Scotland in 1525. Within an hour of meeting Sam and Becky at the station in Oxfordshire, we were being entertained with ancient music from a magical singer.

Photo: Ellie and her family with me and Sam in the middle. Copyright: Song Collectors Collective, 2012. songcollectorscollective@gmail.com

Other unexpected gems that afternoon were in hearing a bit of cant spoken by Ellie’s daughter-in-law Maggie and a couple of yarns and a wonderful telling of a ‘coach and horseman’ ghost story by Ellie’s husband John. We’re really looking forward to spending more time with Ellie and her family who were as welcoming as anyone could possible be and said they’d be happy for us to come back and do some recordings for the Song Collectors Collective project when we next pass through the area.

That evening we hit the road for Sam and Becky’s parent’s house in Herefordshire and were again welcomed with open arms and a welcome bottle of wine. As well as recounting the wonderful afternoon we’d had, I told Sam’s mum Stephanie about the Perseid meteor shower that I’d enjoyed the night before and she spent the next half hour lying on the picnic table outside staring at the sky. Story and lore passed on and the eternal remained present, relevant and utterly beautiful.

SCC Field Diary - Day Zero

SCC TRIP ONE - Day zero
Mon 13th August, 2012
London
Sam Lee, Thomas McCarthy and James McDonald

Having received some financial support from the Irish Arts Council, the Song Collectors Collective (SCC) has now been able to begin its first collecting trip and thereby launch itself into the wider world.

The aims are to not only to collect old songs first hand from traditional singers but also to celebrate those singers and their songs. The first song collecting trip focuses on singers and songs from the Irish Traveller tradition and, as many songs get passed down through families, with some families having their own distinctive versions of songs, it is very important to us that we appraise those families. The SCC is the brainchild of Sam Lee, no not the famous actor from Hong Kong, the other one. More extensive info on the intentions of the group is available on the SCC Facebook page so I won't repeat it here.

In this first phase of collecting, a key collaborator is singer Thomas McCarthy. Thomas's family is an immensely important source of songs. Many members of his family are conduits of truly wonderful old songs and Thomas and his late grandfather John McCarthy are considerable songmakers in their own right. When Thomas became known to the London folk scene, he quickly rose to prominence and was booked for many performances at clubs and festivals in Britain and Ireland. People thought that such source singers were a thing of the past. As well as celebrating the skill of musicians like Thomas, this has also encouraged people like Sam and I to go out and meet the many other wonderful singers who maintain this tradition so that we can help to keep the flame burning for future generations of Travellers and non-Travellers alike.

That’s the plan, now we’ve just got to go do it.

The song that got away

As I stood on the side of the road to Plomari, I thought about a lot of things. I had a lot of things to think about but, more crucially, I had lots of time to think. I was hitch-hiking and nobody was stopping. The inhabitants of the island of Mytilene (aka Lesvos, but called Mytilene by natives) are considered by some Greeks to be the least friendly community in all of the islands, which obviously doesn’t make it a very good place to catch a lift from a stranger – on a quiet back-road, going to a remote village, late at night.

A piece of dried faeces on the road to Plomari in the shape of Mytilene island

Mytilene is one of the most easterly of the Greek islands, separated from Turkey by only a narrow strait. Though the political differences either side of that body of water have been very great at certain times in the past. I was well awareof this as I waited, thumb in the air on the road to Plomari as I had the privilege of meeting a very unique individual on the ferry that had taken me from Ayvalik on the Turkish west coast to Mytilene that afternoon. After the population exchange between Turkey and Greece in the 1920s, only a small minority of the 800,000 Greeks remained in Turkey. In a complex technicality of the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 following the Great War, the two islands of Imvros and Tenedos were ceded to Turkey but their Greek inhabitants remained with the right to self-administration of their communities. What followed however, was a period of terrible discrimination including the prohibition of education in the Greek language on the islands and a violation of many other terms of the Treaty between Greece and Ataturk's new Turkish Republic. Today, there are only a few hundred of these ethnic Greeks with Turkish citizenship and one of them was sitting opposite me, recounting his stories of hardship through another passenger who translated his Greek to my English. Like many others, both of them were travelling to Lesvos to be with their families for Orthodox Easter that weekend.

Easter decorations in Mytilene harbour

As many more cars passed by, I decided to take off my heavy backpack and leave it by the roadside. This was going to take some time. Despite it being Easter Week in the Orthodox calendar, or 'Big Week' as the Greeks call it, generosity was not forthcoming from the locals. Local taxis were asking for an exorbitant 35 euro for the short journey and I couldn’t bear for my return to the EU to be met with such flagrant robbery. I kept thumbing Lesbians and wondered if this was really going to be worth the trip.

Many of the Greek islands have a distinct local music and Mytilene/Lesvos is reknowned for its traditional music, which has been heavily influenced by the music of Asia Minor and the many ethnic Greeks who moved from there in the early part of the 20^th century. Mytilene also has a strong pre-existing connection with the nearest city on the Turkish mainland, Smyrna (now Izmir). I had made the deliberate visit to the island in the hope of tracking down an apparently unique singing tradition within the music of Mytilene. It is a song in the form of a melancholy dialogue, often on nostalgic themes and sung in two-line couplets by one singer in the company after another. The lyrics are often improvised and the social themes raised in the songs are reinforced in meaning by the social context of their dialogical performance. They are called Plomaritikos, meaning 'songs of Plomari', the village I was trying in vain to get to that night.

After about an hour of waiting for a lift, I conceded and accepted the offer of a taxi driver to take me to Plomari for 25 euro, despite the fact that he already had two passengers who were going there. Upon reaching the village, I quickly found a place to stay and then began scouring the tavernas until I found one that looked like the kind of place where folk singing might happen. My enquiries brought me gradually through a series of men with increasing abilities in speaking English until my request was eventually fully understood and I was introduced to Yanis. It turns out I was in the right place and talking to the right man. Yanis is a singer of the Plomaritikos and told me a lot about them, most notably that during the week leading up to Orthodox Easter, people are fasting and it is not appropriate to sing songs in public. As I looked upon the restaurant table in front of Ianis and his friends, its plates of shrimp and other luxurious foods, I pondered the many cultural interpretations of 'fasting' and realised that I was not going to hear the Plomaritikos in Plomari.

Pavlos Kavouras, a lecturer in ethnomusicology at the University of Athens has described the Plomaritikos as follows:

‘A head singer starts singing a whole fifteen-syllable line. One by one, the singers of the singing group join the head singer singing along with him the same line. This dialogical process produces a heterophonous effect. It is most important for the community of the singers to converge on the melodic changes, on the rhythmic stresses and on the ending, which is sung in unison. The performance of the plomaritikos makes manifest a feeling of “unity in multiplicity”. (1)

The road from Plomari

Unfortunately, Kavouras’ description will have to suffice, as I still haven’t heard the Plomaritikos. His description reminds me of the songs we used to make up late at night during a summer I spent working in the Irish speaking area, An Rinn, in the south of Ireland. To the tune of the well-known song 'An poc ar buille' (The mad goat), we each would invent a rhyming couplet in Irish, usually vulgar, topical and about somebody present and then all sing the chorus together (2). There are recordings of the Plomaritkos I could have purchased but I still haven’t gotten over the dissapointment I felt that evening leaving that taverna. As I walked around Plomari’s streets full of the sounds of screeching mopeds, rebetika music spilling out from the bar stereos, I felt defeated. Defeated, but proud that I had made a considerable effort. Unfortunate timing and a significant gap in my research had resulted in an empty handed expedition.

And so, I include here no excerpts, no personal impressions or descriptions. The Plomaritiko will always be the song that got away.

(1) More information on Plomaritikos can be found on Pavlos Kavouras webpage here: http://www.umbc.edu/eol/MA/index/number10/kavour/kav_8.htm

(2) Other similar competitions include shairoba and kapiaoba in north eaastern Georgia.

Down from the mountains

The landscape thawed as we descended into the valley from the snow-capped peaks of the Caucasus mountain range that has separated Georgia from Russia for centuries. I listened to the incomprehensible Georgian dialogue of my hosts as I looked out of the car window at the astounding scenery that passed by: ancient churches, an enormous hydro-electric dam right by the roadside and then a brief stop off in a cottage cum restaurant for a traditional Georgian meal of Khinkali. These delicious meat dumplings originate in this mountainous area in the North East of Georgia and proved much trickier for me to eat that the young Georgian children in our party, leaving my plate covered in the tasty juices that had spilled out from each one while everybody else’s plates remained spotless.


It had been my first day in Georgia and despite having only had a handful of hours sleep since my late-night flight, I had spent the day skiing in the prestigious resort of Gudauri in the north of Georgia. Gudauri remained a popular destination for Georgian skiers but since the August War with Russia only seven months earlier (this was March 2009), Russian tourism had dwindled. The air space here on the northern border of Georgia remained closed, thereby prohibiting Gudauri’s famous heli-skiing, which had attracted many tourists. The rest of the country remained noticeably affected: the signs outside foreign exchange shops in the city showed the rates for USD and Euros but the space beside the Russian Rouble remained empty. There was no trade, no cross-border flights, no diplomatic dialogue.


We drove back towards Tbilisi as the sky grew darker. Then on the radio came a song, which caused the four women in the car to sing along, while the two seven-year old boys in the back remained disinterested. The song was from a Russian children’s cartoon from the Soviet era called Cheburashka. When I asked what the song was about, the attempt at a serious explanation resulted in an eruption of laughter from everyone else due to the silliness of the song. To a chirpy melody and accordion accompaniment, the chorus is:

А я играю на гармошке у прохожих на виду
К сожаленью день рожденья
Только раз в году

And I'm playing the accordion
All the people gaze at me.
It's a pity that birthday’s
Are just once a year.

The song reminded the women of their childhood, but meanwhile in the back of the car, the two boys were listening to American pop music on their mobile phones. The cultural empire had shifted from East to West in a generation. The irony was not lost on Nadia sitting next to me: “Poor Georgians. Once it was Russian music popular, now American music is popular. In twenty years I don’t know which music will be popular.”
I took the opportunity to try to provoke some Georgian songs.
“Do people still sing Georgian songs?”, I asked.
Initially, I was told how there was Georgian pop and even rap, illustrated by the young boys playing a Georgian rap on their phone, but before long, the women quite naturally began singing Georgian folk songs they had learned in school.
Over a dissonant ostinato of lo-fi Georgian rap, they sang a medley of traditional verses in turn, with some casually attempting the distinctive bass drone of Georgian polyphony.

Interspersed with laughter and chatter, they sang songs old and new, the titles and lyrics of which remain unknown to me, but in the end it was the children’s mobile phones that had more stamina; the repertoire of megabytes defeating that of rusty school songs. The negative influence of media technology on indigenous traditions has been well documented around the world. In Ireland in the 1970s, the prodigious song-collector Tommy Munnelly noted:

‘The pleasure garden, the broadside, the industrial revolution, the music hall and many other influences have all altered or eroded the oral tradition, but the death blow was not struck until the advent of radio and television. What need is there to learn a tune or song when the magic box (Pandora's?) will dispense entertainment automatically?’(1)

and similarly it was reported in Java in the 1980s:

‘Whereas dancers used to require the presence of musicians to provide accompaniment for their rehearsals, the standard practice now is to use commercially produced cassettes of dance music, or to make recordings for that purpose. It is not unusual for a dancer to use a cassette recorder for performances, thereby eliminating the musician completely.’ (2)

No doubt, similar oppression on live musical performance has been increasingly occurring all over the world, including in the back seat of our car driving through the Caucasus mountains. As Tom Munnelly points out, it is by no means a new trend. Fashions change, old song-forms are replaced by new, and modes of performance are ushered into extinction by the latest fads. Whether it’s the Lindy Hop being replaced by the Jitterbug in 1950s Harlem dance halls or Georgian rap fighting for survival against Georgian folk polyphony, technology has often been a decisive factor in speeding up the process of change.

However, recording and broadcasting technology can also be the saviour of diverse musics. When, in 2001, Georgian Traditional Polyphony was proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO, a programme of ‘re-education’ was implemented by the Georgian government to teach traditional songs to singers in Georgia using recordings from the 1930s as examples of ‘authenticity’.(3) Indeed, since 1901 the early recordings made by the prodigious Graphaphone Company of Georgian ensembles have proved an invaluable resource in preserving the unique style of polyphonic singing before the onset of the Soviet era.

My experience of hearing the women singing their old songs was more special than any recording of Georgian music I had heard up to that point and since, but if it hadn’t been for the recordings I had heard up to that point, I would not have enquired about their songs and perhaps I would not have been inclined to even travel to Georgia. I enquired with Nadia about the songs: Are they love songs? Some are, she explained, some warriors songs and some are from the supra, the traditional Georgian feast. Nata would show me where to get some CDs before I left, she assured me, and she recommended some good recording artists.

The conversation lulled. The night became dark. Then as we neared the environs of Tbilisi, modernity revealed itself gradually as street lights, billboards and neon, and the women tiredly hummed together –

თბილისო, მზის და ვარდების მხარეო
უშენოდ სიცოცხლეც არ მინდა
სად არის სხვაგან ახალი ვარაზი
სად არის ჭაღარა მთაწმინდა

Tbiliso, mzis da vardebis mkhareo
Ushenod sicockhlec ar minda
Sad aris skhvagan akhali varazi
Sad aris chagara mtatsminda

My Tbilisi, flourish in the sun
My fate is regained
Your splendour is nowhere else to be found
Without you life is without beauty

(1) The Singing Tradition of Irish Travellers, Tom Munnelly, Folk Music Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, Music of the Travelling People (1975), pp. 3-30 Published by: English Folk Dance & Song Society URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4521962 Accessed: 21/07/2009 19:16

(2) Sutton, R. A. (1985) ‘Commercial cassette recordings of traditional music in Java: Implications for performers and scholars’, World of Music, 27/3, pp. 23–45.

(3) Ninoshvili, Lauren, 'Singing Between the Words - The poetics of Georgian polyphony', PhD thesis 2010, Columbia University, p3, referencing discussion with Nino Tsitsishvili

Songs of home - and The Bogs of Shanaheever

‘My youth is long past and I am mighty dreary.
An exile I am cast on the wilds of the prairie.
I'm hunting the wild deer, the panther and the beaver.
But I look back with pride on the bogs of Shanaheever…’

So begins a version of the well-known song ‘The Bogs of Shanaheever’, a lyric tale of the loneliness and longing of exile. The protagonist, an Irish emigrant in America, casts their mind back to the events leading up to their leaving the land of their birth. The song’s most renowned exponent is the great singer from Connemara in West Galway, Joe Heaney.
In a recorded interview with singer and folklorist Ewan MacColl1, Heaney explained that this song, known to Heaney as ‘The Two Greyhounds’ was written in America and brought back to Ireland where it has stayed in the singing tradition ever since. I find his explanation somewhat unconvincing though. My doubts are not allayed any by the fact that the version of 'The Bogs of Shanaheever' that he sings in that same session with MacColl is undoubtedly a fragment, as one of the verses has an extra line to the usual four. This alludes to the fact that there is more to the song, perhaps that two verses have been conflated. The song is pertinent amongst Heaney’s extensive repertoire (MacColl alone recorded forty-two of his songs in that interview alone2) as he was an archetypal Irish exile. Born in the remote Irish speaking Gaeltacht of Connemara, the village of Shanaheever being local to him, Heaney emigrated to England and America like many of his countrymen did then and do now.

Emmigration is nothing unique to the Irish condition, of course. The desire to travel is quite a universal human trait – the absence of the desire being noted with suspicion in individuals who are content to stay put. And so it is no surprise that many cultures have songs about travel and immigration. However, the centrality of the immigrant’s lament for Erin in the canon of Irish song, and indeed the Irish psyche, is indomitable.
James Joyce spent practically all of his adult life on the Continent, constantly moving, but constantly pining for Dublin; her streets, her characters, her language and her stories. It is evidenced in his works, all of which are set in his ‘Hibernian Metropolis’, but also in accounts of his exchanges with visitors he met from Dublin, of whom he would enquire about changing street names and buildings. A sense of home anchors the immigrant as much as it defines a song as being Irish.

‘What part of Wexford is it yer from?’
…

‘Do ya go home much?’
…

So goes the introductory banter on many occasions when meeting with other Irish people in London for the first time.

… ‘shur ya must know the Bass’s and the Berry brothers, so…’

Anchored. Knowing people in common, or at least places is the strongest immediate bond two ‘ex-Pats’ can form.
Meeting Tom King in the Irish Embassy in London was no different. The occasion was a celebration of the young musicians from London who had won medals in the 2008 Fleadh Cheoil, a traditional Irish music competition and festival. As a representative of the West London branch of Comhaltas, I attended and was honoured when asked to sing a song as part of the proceedings. I had one prepared, just in case, and it was ‘The Bogs of Shanaheever’, which I had learned in a singing workshop with Kathleen O’Sullivan at the 2008 Return to Camden Town Festival. Kathleen is a quintessential London Irish woman, meaning not that she is Irish but that she is London born, but Irish - FBI (Foreign Born Irish) some would say. She speaks in a broad cockney accent, initially not filling one with great faith in her authenticity as a highly regarded traditional Irish singer. But when she sings, her voice transforms chameleon-like into that of a woman who never left her rural parish. It carries with it her sense of belonging, her heritage, her mother’s songs. Her version of the ‘Bogs of Shanaheever’ was that sung by Joe Heaney. And so, then, was passed onto me.
The embassy had once been owned by the Guinness family, probably our greatest unofficial ambassadors, and we congregated appropriately in what had been the family’s music room. After the young champion musicians had played and cursory photographs had been taken, I was asked by fellow Wexford-man and well-respected singer Seamus Brogan to sing a song - a deeply appreciated gesture, coming from somebody who I respect so much as a singer. I sang well and the performance was received well, and received best of all by Kerryman Tom King who then invited me to visit his pub in Slough to sing a few songs in their regular session. The following week I went to his pub and was greeted with a firm handshake and a down-to-business offer of a pint.

As the pint was settling at the bar, I was given the tour of the premises. Tom’s pub, The Hershcel Arms, is not small but is off the beaten track on a side street – a side street in Slough, which is also a bit out of the way. A subtle decoration of Irish memorabilia and a less subtle Kerry mural give the Hershel its signature Irish charm. But this is far from a token ‘Oirish’ pub. Its name for a start is far from Irish – no themed pub from California to Kyoto would get christened ‘The Herschel Arms’. (In fact, there’s an Irish pub in Berkeley called The Plough and one in Kyoto called The Field.) Tom King is no ‘plastic Paddy’ either. His strong accent betrays his Guaranteed Irish upbringing and his dedication to traditional music is well respected in the London Irish community.
My next pint was pulled by Tom’s grand-daughter who was over visiting from County Kildare for her school holidays. Not even able to reach the taps unaided, she’s definitely the youngest person I’ve ever been served by – but the pint was delicious and when I told her the same, her glowing sense of achievement made it an unforgettable one.
An hour or so later I was sitting in the front bar around a table with all the other musicians. A solid band of fiddlers to my left and a few singers and guitarists to my right, stories of men of previous generations flowed around the room as lukewarm phrases from fiddles and flutes flexed airs in the background

‘He had enough skin on him for three men, Joe did’
‘He had all the answers, Joe did’
‘He was a frightfully wrinkly man was Joe’
‘He was a legend. The stories he used to tell’

A set of tunes kicked off with the steady reel, ‘Christmas Eve’. A delightful and familiar tune followed by another reel and then a song by the man seated to my right Martin Conroy. Martin was introduced to me earlier as a Galway man and though he’d been in England since the ‘60s he hadn’t lost his accent one bit – not that night anyway. Keeping his guitar tacitly tacet on his lap as he sang ‘The Hills of South Armagh’, a song of longing to be home there, ‘where the air is fresh and clean, where the grass is fresh and green…’, not in ‘the crowded streets of Brooklyn…’ where ‘… my children speak in accents not like mine…’. Martin’s singing in a mid-Atlantic style added another layer of interpretation to the lyrics, though I’m not sure if he ever lived in the U.S.
This song was an overture for what was to come. A few songs and tunes and much banter later, the landlord Tom King asked me to sing the song he had heard me sing in the embassy. I sang ‘The Bogs of Shanaheever’, knowingly in the immediate company of two men from that region, so making sure to pronounce the placenames correctly as I had been guided on a previous occasion by London residing Connemara singer and pure gentleman, Pat Connolly.
An appreciative swell of applause swallowed up that seemingly everlasting moment of silence that follows a slow unaccompanied song. I have yet to fully savour that silence, and instead always succumb to some utterance to signal that the song is over so as not to prolong the silence. Ushering instead that needed applause, like that eye-widening life giving breath after swimming blindly under the surface for six verses. Martin complemented me on the song.
And then, he uttered those intriguing words.

‘But we sing it a bit differently at home’.

This might be a big disappointment to some singers, embarrassed perhaps that they haven’t got a genuine version. On the contrary, I was fascinated and asked what was different about the version he knew. As Martin delved into his memory and uttered the words he had known years before I realised that his were something quite different, bringing new elements to the story. I asked him to wait while I scrambled at the bar for a pen and paper.
No paper.
Anything at all?
Tom offered an envelope from beside the till, and a pen.
I quickly set to jotting down Martin’s version as he recalled it. The song opened the same – in America, where the emigrant now finds their self – though, whereas I sang that the emigrant had hunted the wild deer, they now have ‘fought the red man, the panther and the beaver / But my mind calls me back to the bogs of Shanaheever’
A verse entirely new to me then followed:

‘In England at that time, their boast it was Susannah,
And young Willie Ayers his boast it was Diana,
My two-year-old dog was knacky, quick and clever
I’d give Victor his sway on the bogs of Shanaheever’

Martin recalled six verses, each in solid four line strophic form, unlike Joe Heaney’s version hinting at fragmentation and contraction. There was more story in this new version. More characters and a mention of England. And unlike Heaney’s two greyhounds, this one had three greyhounds! Certainly an upgrade!

Being given Martin’s version of the song gave it a unique value. I have since sung his version, or at least a hybrid of the two, and each time been reminded of that night in Tom King’s pub in Slough. I’ve also been reminded of that part of West Galway where I’ve never been. It’s a landscape familiar in my mind, frequently revisited, and totally imagined.
Bjork once said in an interview3 that it occurred to her that all of the national anthems of the world were essentially the same song. It’s a keen observation. Perhaps though, we can go further in identifying most songs as national anthems. When considering the wider interpretation of nationality in a postmodern and cosmopolitan society, our music is not only part of our identity, it is our home.


The Bogs of Shanaheever anchors me in Ireland, but also endorses my expatriation. It connects me those who gave me the song - Martin Conroy for his version, Tom King for inviting me to his pub, Seamus Brogan for asking me to sing in the embassy, Pat Connolly who corrected my mispronunciation of its place-names, Kathleen O’Sullivan who brought it to life, Joe Heaney who recorded it – emigrants one and all. Exiles longing for their Shanaheever.


1 - A full transcript of the interview is available here.

2 - Fred McCormick has ‘partially’ listed Heaney’s repertoire with 223 songs and 103 stories here

3 - This interview was in the feature documentary 'Screaming Masterpiece', a film about music in Iceland.

Passing it on - the collection of my first song

I had heard Bruce Scott sing at Fleadheanna (Irish music competitions) and small folk festivals before. His voice was unmistakable. A room-filling baritone, each syllable crisply pronounced and projected magisterially through his Liverpudlian accent. An accent which belies too his Irish roots; Bruce's grandparents were Irish and his interest in the country, and particularly its songs, has been passed down since to his daughter Tracey and her daughter, Melissa, who is also proving herself as a prolific traditional song-maker1.

Melissa and Bruce's wife Dot were both with him at the All-Britain Fleadh in Leicester in 2008. Bruce had won many All-Britain Fleadh titles in the singing competition - his name was engraved more than any on the large silver perpetual trophy. He had also got to the final of the song-writing competition on numerous occasions and it was one of his own songs that I was hunting that day.
Earlier that year in May, Bruce and I had both been at the Keith Summers Festival in London. I recall walking up the stairs of the King and Queen pub in London's Fitzrovia (a place-name always worth mentioning - it rolls of the tongue mellifluously - as does the word mellifluously actually... anyway...) as I walked up the stairs, I could hear Bruce singing and immediately recognised his strong Scouse voice. He sang many songs over that weekend, as did many other fine singers from these islands, but Bruce sang a song he had made about my native Wexford that stood out for me. Like many others set in Wexford, the song concerns the 1798 rebellion of the United Irishmen. Bruce had researched his topic well and put the song to a complimentary traditional air. It's a funny thing when you hear a song and you can't help but imagine it coming out of your own mouth. You feel as you hear it that it would suit your own voice, your own style. It has a story you want to tell, sometimes even just phrases or words that you want to utter. And with that a melody that you know you will not tire of through all the repetitions required to hone it well enough to sing it for others.

A few months later in Leicester I got the opportunity to ask him for the song. Not a request I would make lightly; it's an endorsement of a requesting singer to give them a song, particularly if it's one you made yourself. Realising this, I treaded lightly. I sat with him and his family as we listened to the junior singing competitions that morning. At a natural point I mentioned that I really enjoyed the song he had sung about Wexford and would love to sing it. Bruce was more than happy to pass it on and I asked if I could record him singing it. He obliged and after the competitions had finished, Bruce, Dot and I stayed on in the competition room and I set up my mini-disk recorder. Bruce produced a small black notebook from his pocket and leafing through the surprisingly ordered songs laid-out inside, he found 'The Heroes of '98'.

'Remember those who for Ireland rose in the year of '98,
Those Wexford men, from hill and glen, their deeds commemorate...'

The song’s sympathies are biased certainly, I wouldn’t have wanted it otherwise, but it is compassionate and respectful. Bruce had written it in 1998, for the bicentenary of the events depicted - not dissimilarly to how 'Boolavogue', now a central song in the Wexford canon, was composed by P.J. McCall to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the insurgency.

Somewhat unknowingly, I collected my first song that day, at least in the formal sense of going out with that particular goal in mind with a recording device to a source singer. The song was followed immediately by other songs and stories – songs Bruce had made about Wexford, Dublin and indeed his most acclaimed song ‘The People’s Own MP’ about Bobby Sands, the hunger striker. The People’s Own MP has been covered by a number of commercial recording artists including Christy Moore.
After lunch was the senior singing competition. Bruce and I had both entered – me for the first time. He asked what I would sing. I said I hoped to sing 'Come All You Warriors', an epic song written soon after the events of 1798 and believed to be a significant template for the aforementioned ‘Boolavogue’2. 'Hoh, you'll definitely win if you sing that one!' he said. And he was right.

I felt a rite of passage had occurred in that kind comment from Bruce and the decision of the adjudicator that day. My peers had expressed that I was of the singing standard of somebody I very much looked up to. Later that day, Bruce's grand-daughter pipped him in the song writing competition, coming first as he came second and with me coming third.
The tradition was firmly being upheld by the youth - a very healthy sign, and Bruce appreciated that. I felt that I was a traditional singer that day. Melissa was merited as a song-maker. Bruce had already made his mark as a singer and song-maker, now he was a tradition bearer.

1 - The term ‘song-maker’ is preferred by many people in the traditional Irish music community to the more widely used ‘song-writer’ in popular music or ‘composer’ in classical and jazz. 'Song-maker' as a term implying a craft and the art of traditional song-making is explored and expounded respectively in the RTÉ Radio programme Songmakers and in the seventh chapter of Hugh Shields’ ‘Narrative Singing in Ireland’.

2 - See George Denis Zimmerman’s ‘Songs of Irish Rebellion’.

Capoeira and cosmopolitan discourse

London, my home, is the epitome of cosmopolitanism. A busy hive of people from different places, cultures and politics where they are meeting, conversing, trading and combining ideas, traditions and technologies. This integration is often productive and harmonious but sometimes, just sometimes, utterly devastating.


Capoeira is a fusion of musical styles and art forms. The quintessential Afro-Brazilian tradition is a street opera of music, song, dance and martial arts. Feigning the kicks and punches of combat, two participants move within a circle of musicians and onlookers. With slow, acrobatic movements, they flow gracefully, giving time for their fake blows to be avoided and countered by their dancing opponent. Leg sweeps trigger hand-stands. Graceful high kicks cause the other to duck and pass under their opponent’s hovering leg. All the while the musicians play a pulsing rhythm and sing repeated call-and-response verses while playing drums, rasps, maracas and the berimbau (a bow-like instrument in loose tuning).
The high performance of capoeira, encompassing many complimentary art forms, has a solid foundation in the simplicity of its music. Allowing ease of participation, in any given performance, dancers can become musicians and vice versa, moving informally from the ring of fighters to the row of musicians and picking up an instrument. The music is simple and repetitive. The Portuguese song lyrics, with occasional slang of West African origin, belie the origins of the game. The simple music does not allow much scope for virtuosity – that is left to the dancers.


And there was no shortage of flamboyance in a display of capoeira I witnessed recently on my cycle home from work through Stockwell in South London. Outside the underground station a group of capoeira performers had gathered for a roda (capoeira performance) to commemorate the fatal shooting of Brazilian Jean Charles De Menezes five years ago on the 21st of July, 2005.
The day after his death Jean Charles was declared innocent. He had not been linked to the militant Islamist network that the London Metropolitan Police were monitoring that fateful day (only two weeks after a series of suicide bombings on London busses and tube trains and the day after subsequent attempted bombings). The impressions of warfare by the dancers on the footpath echoed the violent incident their ritual acknowledged. Each dance is a physical dialogue, a mock battle, sometimes placid, sometimes more heated, but with no harmful contact. The greater ‘conversation’ in modern society is not always so pacifistic.

The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has identified cosmopolitanism as a conversation, though not one in which people have to attain consensus. I agree. It would be a shame if we all agreed on everything, and an equal shame if we all looked the same, made the same music and danced the same dance.

Capoeira is a mix of many native traditions and its exponents come from many ethnicities; the performance I witnessed at Stockwell station was certainly no exception. The dancers abilities too, were as varied as their nationalities, some being more experienced and adventurous with their movements than others. But occasionally, the capoeira dancers let their concentration slip and an unintended collision of foot and face occurs. In such an instance, the music continues, with the odd wince from the onlookers, the dancers acknowledge the error with smiles and gestures and continue the dance.
The incident of social friction marked by that particular evening’s performance was not quite so forgivable. The physical and intellectual discourse between greater western society and militant Islam includes intentionally violent acts from both parties, and even the reactionary clumsiness that causes unintended deaths, like that of Menezes, and the countless others around the world, are not followed with the same acceptance of apology as that of the amicable capoeiristas.

Capoeira is a poignant art form for the remembrance of the wars of the past, but more significantly it is a beautiful way for people to come together. In this blog, I intend to explore the meetings of many cultures, traditions, musics and individuals as I encounter them. And in each instance I hope to explore the coming together of ideas and the many ways we express them. I also would like to see this blog triggering some dialogue and healthy debate on the topics that arise from my posts. Capoeira is a good place to start.


Cosmopolitanism and capoeira as discourse are explored respectively in the following texts:
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Kwame Anthony Appiah, 2006
Ring of liberation: deceptive discourse in Brazilian capoeira, John Lowell Lewis, University of Chicago Press, 1992
Both books will hopefully make you feel very good about the world and being human. The latter is available for free through Google Books.