Description
The Heart’s a Wonder Vol. 2
This is yet another album that is just about the song – like Vol. 1. Forget all about “style” and “originality” and being over-cautious about sounding like anyone else… Eclecticism rules! OK? This is really a “collection” rather than an album per se. Anyway, the whole concept of an “album” issued as a CD is nowadays, sadly, a thing of the past since young generation music-lovers just download selected single tracks while their parents (for reasons I still can’t fully comprehend) throw out their CD players and CD Walkmans and tell me when I show them my latest: “It looks lovely…but we have nothing to play it on at home.”
People have asked me to explain the title of these two volumes called “The Heart’s a Wonder”. It comes from a line in John Millington Synge’s stage drama “The Playboy of the Western World” which I have always found mesmerizeingly beautiful – the language is Co. Mayo Hiberno-English, dating from the 1890s or thereabouts. It’s not fully Gaelic in idiom and certainly not standard English yet it draws me into a dream-like world of Irish thought-processes. The conversations the characters are having seem to be in a now forgotten mind-set. One constantly thinks of the language created by Synge as evoking the way Irish people used to think centuries ago. I felt I could extract some of these beautiful conversations and build them into a bi-lingual song, meaning that I would, by necessity, have to change the words here and there to make them rhyme with preceding and succeeding end-words and, along with that, make the song lyrics fit the tune I had in mind. It was very difficult. I wrote 13 stanzas in this style but in the end had to abandoned the project. The song was called The Heart’s a Wonder. Maybe some day I’ll finish it. But the way the songs on this album move from Irish to English is a kind of heart’s wonder too, I suppose.
An Soilcí agus An Mhaighdean Mhara (The Silkie and The Mermaid)
I sang “An Mhaighdean Mhara” frequently in the singing classes at Coláiste Bhríde but have recorded it here for the first time. It is a totally unique melody. I have yet to hear another Irish melody that it resembles. No line of the music ever repeats, making its structure ABCD. Usually in traditional songs it’s AABA or ABBA. There is a seamless flow to this song’s melody and that alone makes it all the more remarkable. The version I sing was first recorded in The Central Hotel in Letterkenny by the American collector Al Lomax in 1951. The singer then was Caitlín Ní Ghallchóir from Gweedore. Her family was noted for the keeping alive of songs and stories that were on the verge of extinction. Indeed, Caitlín’s sister, Áine, was also a fine singer (Annie Eoghain Éamoinn). Áine made the first commercial disc recording of the song which was broadcast on radio programmes at various times. It was from one of these that I learned the song. In the Donegal tradition of the scéal-amhrán (song-story), the song, by right, should be prefaced, as Caitlín did in 1951, by the accompanying story. A young man, a fisherman, lives with his mother close to the shore. One day he sees a mermaid coming in from the sea dressed in a beautiful cloak of seal-skin. He lifts her out of the water and takes her home. He discovers that she has grown legs, like humans, but he is worried that she might return to the sea. He finds her some clothes and hides the cloak under the thatch of his house. He then asks permission from his mother to marry her and she grants it. They marry and have two children: Máire Bhán and Pádraig Bán. The man notices that the woman cannot speak but he doesn’t mind as she seems to be a fine mother and wife. The children grow up to school age. One day they are playing around the house when they spot the cloak jutting out from the thatch. Their father is away fishing and their mother is inside the house preparing the dinner. They rush in and show her the cloak. As soon as she sees it she realizes where she has come from. She puts on the cloak and walks towards the sea and sinks beneath the waves. The children are very distressed and when their father returns they all go immediately in search of her. Later that evening they get a glimpse of her on a rock far out at sea. She is singing. They are surprised by this as they have never heard their mother speak, let alone sing. When the song ends, she waves them goodbye and sinks into the water. In another version of the story – from Sligo – she turns her children into stones to stymie any attempt to prevent her returning to the sea. However, the Sligo tale has no known accompanying song, unless this Donegal song used to be sung in that county but has since been forgotten. Sligo has now no Gaeltacht where such songs would have lingered on.
The “Mary Chinidh” of the last line of each stanza has puzzled may people, but that erudite professor / musician from Derry, Risteard Mac Gabhann, believes that she alludes to Melusina of the ancient legends of Europe – a beautiful mermaid, a female spirit who comes from the underworld to unite carnally with a man.
This song, over the decades, has been sung only by women but if you look closely at the text you will see that it’s the husband who is narrating the story and lamenting the loss of his dear wife.
What I call “An Soilcí” here in the title is the tune associated with the ancient song “The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry”, a traditional folk song from Orkney and Shetland in Scotland. In it, a woman has her child taken away by its father, the Great Silkie of Sule Skerry, which can transform from a seal into a human. The woman is fated to marry a gunner who will harpoon the Silkie and their son. I just use its tune here to create ambience.
True Colours
This song was written by American songwriters Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly. It was a hit single released from American singer Cyndi Lauper in 1986. Billy Steinberg originally wrote “True Colours” about his own mother but Tom Kelly altered the first verse to make it more universal. Lauper, in her rendering, came up with something that was described by the song-writers as “breathtaking and stark”. In my own version (in Jim Walker’s fabulous arrangement here) I have tried to strip it down to the song’s essential message which is about the restoring of a person’s character and self-confidence.
Báighe Inis Fraoich (The Bay of Inishfree)
I received a letter in 2022 from actor / film-maker Niall Mac Eachmharcaigh from Rann na Feirste whom I had met many years earlier while teaching at Coláiste Bhríde. He told me he had written the lyrics for a song and asked could I supply a suitable melody. After several unsuccessful attempts, I finally came up with an original tune that I was pleased with but had to contact Niall again to ask him if I could make some changes to his lyrics. The protagonist in his narrative had been rejected, on religious grounds, by the girl he loved. This wasn’t the problem, though. Niall’s hero was also terminally ill and my melody was far too cheerful! Could the man not have found another lover and married her and lived happily ever after? I know, I know. It’s a Hollywood ending. But it makes for a pleasanter song with a pleasanter outcome, I think. Niall conceded.
Turas go Tír na nÓg (Journey to the Land of Eternal Youth)
This extraordinary song first appeared in print in 1920 in Pádruig Breathnach’s “Ár gCeól Féinig”. The tune, without a name, was taken down from musician Séamus de Róiste in Fermoy, Co. Cork, and new words were written to it by a very gifted college professor called Feardorcha Ó Conaill. Ó Conaill, who was fluent in 15 or 16 different languages, sometimes wrote under the nom de plume of “Conall Ceárnach” and was born in Connemara in 1876, son of a Protestant vicar. “Turas go Tír nÓg” tells of the desire of the poet to make a sea journey to the land of eternal youth. The wind is stirring… the birds are going down to rest…darkness falls…there is a bleating of lambs from the russet hillside and the sound of water trickling in the current along the shore. The poet’s soul is lonely, the night long…his spirit wishes to rise with the sun and escape from the troubles of the world…A voice beckons him away and, on a gentle breeze, he sails off with hoisted sail to Tír na nÓg – the land of light, and poetry and friendship. The song is a simple but impassioned expression of longing.
As I Roved Out
“As I roved out…” opens the account of many traditional ballads in the English language, but this song, both musically and poetically, is no cliché. There is a powerful, emotional curve to the melody that any of the great composers of classical music would undoubtedly hail as a tour de force. The folklorist Sean O’Boyle believed that the words could have been written in Stratford-on-Avon, such is the refinement its imagery and its turns of phrase. It comes from the singing of Fermanagh songster, Paddy Tunney.
I have been singing this song for many years now and it appeared on a live album called “Amhráin agus Bódhráin” in 1994 with guitar accompaniment. Just recently, I heard a new take on the song from English singer June Tabor where she used a piano to accompany her. I thought it was very effective and tried the same myself here with Úna Page’s magical finger-work.
When I Fall in Love
“When I Fall in Love” is a popular song, written by Victor Young (music) and Edward Heyman (lyrics). The song has become a standard, with many artists recording it including Nat King Cole and his daughter Natalie. The first hit version was sung by Doris Day, released in July 1952. I based my version on the one recorded by Marilyn Monroe in the late 1950s. I sang it as part of my marriage vows to my darling Kathryn in 2022.
The Maid of Culmore
The song is found in Sam Henry’s Songs of the People but his title is The Maids of Culmore, although it’s clear from the words that the man in the song loves only one maid from that village. It was collected by Henry in 1937 from John Moore of Cloyfin (north east of Coleraine) who had learned it from James McMullan, an itinerant farm labourer. Culmore is about two miles north of Derry city where the river Foyle broadens into Lough Foyle. The village was an emigrants’ departure point. The song is thought to date from the late 1800s. This part of Co. Derry was formerly within the Barony of Inishowen, so I consider The Maid of Culmore an Inishowen song.
Although the name Culmore is pronounced Coolmore in the song (closer in sound to the original Irish– An Chúil Mhór, The Big Angle), it is always pronounced locally as Cul… rather than Cool… The melody itself is quite commonplace but Mícheál Ó Domhnaill’s exquisite guitar chording – in The Bothy Band recording – reveals some quite unexpected musicality, which goes to show that the full complement of song + accompaniment is something that should be considered very carefully. Sean-nós songs, in the Gaelic tradition, for instance, may have been originally accompanied by harps, tiompáin and other instruments in medieval times. Sometimes – in field recordings in particular – we are only experiencing a fragmentary aspect of Irish music, albeit a very rich one.
The first line of the song is often sung, for politico-cultural reasons, “From sweet lovely Derry…” but “From sweet Londonderry…” was how it was presented to Sam Henry in 1937.
Experience
If my facts are correct (and I did ask MCPS in Dublin to check it for me), only two people have ever made recorded versions of this little-known but rather beautiful song written by the Bee Gees: Diana Ross and myself! The Bee Gees themselves never recorded it. I put it on my “Crimson Moon” album of 2018 but it was rather lost there among songs of a different ilk. Hopefully, it sits better in this collection.
Cold Blows the Wind
Sometimes called “The Unquiet Grave”. It is a folk song in which a young man mourns his dead love too hard and prevents her from obtaining peace. It is thought to date from around 1400 and versions of it ——–
were collected in England in the mid-1800s by Francis James Child. The theme burrowed its way into the Irish tradition, resulting in songs like Táim Sínte ar do Thuama (I am stretched out on your Grave). Cold Blows the Wind is a Galway version of the Child ballad that I learned from the singing of the great Delia Murphy. Her melody, which sounds very Irish to me, has the sweep and arch of a great sean-nós song from the West of Ireland. People in Ireland would often, tiring of a dull tune, substitute it with a better one in order to communicate the true essence of song / story.
A man mourns his true love for “a twelve month and a day”. At the end of that time, the dead woman complains that his weeping is keeping her from peaceful rest. He begs a kiss. She tells him it would kill him. When he persists, wanting to join her in death, she explains that when they are both dead their hearts would simply decay. He should enjoy life while he has it.
The motif that excessive grief can disturb the dead is found also in German and Scandinavian ballads, as well as in Greek and Roman traditions. Although violent deaths – perpetrated mostly by men – are unconscionable irrespective of gender, I dedicate this song to the current plague of violence against women in Ireland.
The Munster Cloak
Spanish influence on Irish music is not widespread. Some vessels of the Spanish Armada foundered on the coasts of Donegal, Galway, Sligo and Kerry in the late 1500s. Some survivors may have stayed in Ireland and married local girls and, perhaps, brought a tune or two with them from the old country. An Fhalaingín Mhuimhneach (The Munster Cloak) is a Gaelic song whose tune, or part of it, was published by Bartlett Cooke in 1793 as “The Bonny Black Irish Maid” but the tune is unmistakably Spanish. The Spanish composer Enrique Granados (1867-1916) features a variant of this same melody in his “Danza Espaňol” No.6, Op. 37, published in 1893. The earliest appearance of An Fhalaingín Mhuimhneach in print, with both words and music, is in Joyce’s Old Irish Folk Music and Songs (Dublin, 1909). It’s quite feasible that this Spanish melody was warmly received by the people of Kerry in the late 1500s. It inspired at least one anonymous Gaeltacht poet to write words to fit it. The song is a vivid description of a cloak of many colours – no doubt, the pride and joy of the poet. –I am delighted to include here this quirky instrumental arrangement by my old pal Phil Feidhlimí Stewart. He plays it here on low whistles with his sweetheart Sabina Weidauer. It was meant to feature on Vol. 1 of The Heart’s a Wonder as part of my sung version but here it is in all its instrumental glory.
My Lagan Love
The house where this exquisite melody was written down by Herbert Hughes in 1904 is still standing to this day (2024) in Fawns, a rural district just a short distance to the north of Kilmacrennan, Co. Donegal. It is abandoned. Hughes tells us that it was played on the fiddle on that occasion by schoolmaster Proinnsias Mac Suibhne living in Fawns. Proinnsias told him his father John had learned it from a sapper working on the Ordnance Survey (1830s) who in turn had heard it sung to a ballad called The Belfast Maid in Kilmacrennan village. The ballad itself had been forgotten by 1904 but Proinnsias had the melody.
I’m sure it was the title The Belfast Maid that inspired the Belfast poet Joseph Campbell -Hughes’s collaborator – to pen his new lyrics My Lagan Love for this tune. The Lagan River flows through Belfast, but anyone looking at the Kilmacrennan map can see that it is the Largy Stream the poet had in mind which he simplified to Lagan.
Hughes set My Lagan Love and 17 other songs to piano accompaniments in a collection published as “Songs of Uladh”. My Lagan Love would soon be gracing the halls and recital rooms of the world but, surprisingly, not in Hughes’s embryonic setting. It was Hamilton Harty’s arrangement of it that catapulted it to fame. Hughes was baffled by the air’s strange inflections and, feeling it was beyond his musical capabilities, sent it to his compatriot, Harty, a decision he later regretted. The one Hughes published was greatly under-arranged. Although myriads of versions of this song have been recorded commercially – mostly instrumental – I have returned here to the Hamilton Harty’s vocal arrangement of 1905. Úna Page keeps faithfully to his piano writing but interprets it as a harp sound which I think is very effective indeed.
My Lagan Love is known all the world over now. Harty’s arrangement really brought a touch of sean-nós to the recital hall because it wasn’t just the quality of the melody that impressed but the harp-like arpeggios of the piano writing, its ornamentation plus some rather strange, exotic figurations. It was like no other folk-song arrangement at that time.
An Bonnán Buí (The Yellow Bittern)
An Bonnán Buí is a classic poem by the poet Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Gunna (c1680-c1756). Versions of it are still sung in all the Gaeltacht areas of Ireland. My version, which has only three verses, was learned at sessions in Rann na Feirste where the whole essence of the story is encapsulated in three stanzas only (some versions have more than three.). In the early 1970s, the great guitarist of Skara Brae and Bothy Band fame, Mícheál Ó Domhnaill (1951-2006), joined me one evening in Hiúdaí Beag’s in an after-hours session, along with Gerry Garvey of Armagh. Mícheál kindly put me through the guitar riffs he had worked out for the song. He was such a generous soul. He later used this same guitar arrangement for his sisters Tríona and Maighréad when they recorded the song for a Gael-Linn single in 1975. I was initially reluctant to sing the song in public – in his particular arrangement – while he was alive and probably doing it at various venues. But now, since he has sadly departed from us, I sing it proudly and with him in mind. While recording it in a studio recently, the Derry guitarist Jim Walker thought the guitar work had something of the complexity of Blackbird by the Beatles!
The poem is in the form of a lament for a bittern that died of thirst, but is also a tongue-in-cheek defence by the poet of his own drinking habit. The descriptor “buí” (yellow) is in the names of both the bittern and the poet who was known as “Cathal Buí” or “Yellow Cathal,” because of his fair hair. It has been translated into English by, among others, James Stephens, Thomas MacDonagh, Thomas Kinsella, and Seamus Heaney.
Do Bhí Bean Uasal (There Was a Nobel Lady) / Carrickfergus
The jury is still out regarding the provenance of this song. As a melody, it contains within its curvature a soaring high section reminiscent of na hamhráin mhóra (the big songs) of Gaelic Ireland where the melodic line collapses to the fith note of the scale. Not many singers can do it full justice, but I have to say that Seán Ó Sé’s live-concert rendering of it in 1969, under the direction of Seán Ó Riada, is one that stays with me. But is Ó Sé’s bi-lingual Do Bhí Bean Uasal really the same Ulster song we know as Carrickfergus?
The dialect of the former is certainly a Munster dialect. But “Malaí, a stóirín…”, in its last line, ties it immediately to a poem by the South East Ulster poet Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Gunna (c1680-c1756) who wrote a poem called Mailí Mhómhar (Modest Molly) in his Ulster dialect which begins with Do bhí bean uasal. Mailí Mhómhar also contains several couplets and half-stanzas that are found in the Ó Sé version. I remember well the actor Peter O’Toole in a radio interview saying that his family background was in Co. Mayo which isn’t close at all to the linguistic-cultural district of South East Ulster where Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Gunna was grew up. I mention this because the origin of the song we know today as Carrickfergus can be traced back to Peter O’Toole who claimed that he had learned it from his father, Patrick Joseph O’Toole. In on-line research work done outlining the first ever commercial recordings of the song, it cites a Dublin singer called Dominic Behan as the first person to record it (twice) in the early 1960s, calling it, respectively, The Kerry Boat Song and Kerry Boatman, neither of which can be the correct title as Kerry is not referenced anywhere in the song. Behan claimed that had learned it directly from the singing of Peter O’Toole in the mid or late 1950s. The Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem sang it as Carrickfergus on their 1964 album “The First Hurrah!”, clearly learned from the Behan recordings.
So, the song in English we know today may not have been known originally as Carrickfergus, although Carrickfergus is mentioned in the first line. But even Behan was unsure of the song’s title as is evidential from the above. The world did eventually get to know it as Carrickfergus but no earlier than the Clancy Brothers recording of 1964. It was sung everywhere after that under that specific title.
Having heard Dominic Behan’s two versions (YouTube), I can hear the embryonic melody the The Clancy Brothers had taken up and improved upon, making it the beautiful melody we know today. So, credit must surely go to the Clancys for this. However, Ó Sé’s bi-lingual Do Bhí Bean Uasal shares that same melody (more or less; Ó Sé drops to a low note in some of the cadences making it, somehow, a very memorable trope.). It has been suggested, unfairly, that Ó Riada himself may have reconstructed the Mac Giolla Gunna poem to make it fit the tune, but the words, without a melody, of a c1830 bilingual broadside ballad, distributed by Haly of Cork, were clearly his source. It was called “The Young Sick Lover”, and began in phonetic Irish with “De vee ban osul, shol da lough lum”. Ó Riada renamed the song Do Bhí Bean Uasal from its first line, and, since the concert in which it was performed in 1969 was dedicated to the poets of South Ulster, the textual similarities to Mac Giolla Gunna’s poem, Mailí Mhómhar, would have been all too obvious to the cognoscenti and academics present in the hall. Of course, the rest of the audience would have been very familiar with the Carrickfergus melody and the half-stanzas in English. Ó Riada may well have have taken the Clancys’s improved melody but modifying that too with the distinctive dropped-down note. It is not known for certain if the Giolla Gunna poem was ever sung to this air but its metre is the same and with some slight modifications to the text it can, indeed, be sung to it. The other puzzling aspect to it – and the main reason why the jury is still out deliberating – is the disparity between the Munster dialect of the broadsheet and the Ulster dialect of Mac Giolla Gunna…and how all this reached the ears of Patrick Joseph O’Toole of Mayo whose Irish dialect would have been a Connaught one! But O’Toole’s father, apparently, only passed on the two English language verses to his son – the ones we know today – and not the Irish verses. Did Patrick Joseph know the Irish stanzas? Patrick Joseph’s father, James O’Toole, was a native Irish speaker, according to the 1911 Census for Westport, Co. Mayo, so there is a possibility that the Irish verses were known to the family. It still remains a mystery. Peter O’Toole himself could have provided some answers and explanations, but, sadly, he died in 2013.
Between them, collectively – Mac Giolla Gunna; Peter O’Toole and his ancestors; Dominic Behan; The Clancys; Sean Ó Sé; and Seán Ó Riada – they have left us an inspired work of musical and poetical excellence that no doubt will live on for centuries.
Eibhlín a Rúin (Eileen, My Love)
Eibhlín (Eileanóir Chaomhánach) is the love interest in the song Seachrán Chearbhaill, allegedly composed by Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh [fl.1590-1630]. I recorded a version of this in 2000. According to tradition, the same lady is celebrated in the song Eibhlín a Rúin which is also attributed to Ó Dálaigh. The narrative in the latter is the proposal of marriage to this same Eibhlín / Eileanóir.
There are several contrasting versions of Eibhlín a Rúin; the words in each case are completely different and the melodies at considerable variance with each other. The one on this album was collected in Co. Clare and is, musically, a rather elaborate account requiring some knowledge of sean-nós singing to perform it properly.
