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.

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.