Emigration Songs

I first wrote on one particular song of emigration – a song that itself emigrated, and changed in doing so, in “The Blooming Bright Star of BelleIsle” which is in the page – The 1980s – four items – and work on the Sam Henry Collection generated another relevant item – North American Influence on a North Irish Song Collection.

Two other items appear further down this page:

• The Preface to my little book Thousands are Sailing: a brief song history of Irish emigration
• The text of an article that appeared in It’s us they’re talking about, the proceedings of the McGlinchey Summer School – it also bears on Song Cultures – Regional Song Cultures.

This interest emerged from The Higgins Manuscript (because it included the Star of Belleisle), but also from the Sam Henry Collection and the involvement of Gary Hastings, (now, the flute playing, Church of Ireland Rector of Killiney, Co Dublin) and his wife, Caitríona Ní Gallchóir, then a lecturer in Irish at the New University of Ulster, in a bi-annual Conference, held alternately in Northern Ireland and USA, The Ulster-American Heritage Symposium. In 1984, they were awarded grants which allowed them to go to America to give talks at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. When I heard, I was envious but encouraged. Among the Sam Henry Collection, and especially the papers, were large numbers of songs of emigration, and also of songs that had emigrated including some American ones that had been brought back with returned migrants. However, there was also a substantial amount of correspondence with American singers and collectors. In 1986 I gave a lecture to the Symposium, that year in Coleraine, entitled “North American Influence on a North Irish Song Collection“. This is posted in a revised and illustrated form via a link to the online video of its presentation at The Library of Congress, Washington, DC, in 2007. NOTE, the video may not be accessible, though the audio. The slides have been posted and may be read as the audio plays.

My appearance at the 1986 conference was well received and led to some enduring friendships. It was also instrumental in encouraging me to position myself to do some more academic work, albeit of an applied kind. For some years I’d been using local historical documents, photographs, maps, the local environment – and songs, to try to get Primary School Children, eleven year-olds, to read and look critically at documents and their surroundings. My account of that work, if anybody is interested, is “The Use of Local Knowledge and Original Documents with Older Primary School Children’ in Roger Austin (ed.) Essays on History Teaching in Northern Ireland (The Resource Centre, Faculty of Education, University of Ulster, Curriculum Papers No. 2, 1985) – and also see, on the Menu Songs in Education. I conceived the idea that songs of emigration, carefully handled and supported with other documents could be instrumental in conveying, in a highly compact form, the mechanics, and the emotion, of leaving one’s homeplace for ever; because in the 19th Century that was how it was. I became aware of a scheme whereby teachers could spend an entire school year at one of the major cultural institutions of Northern Ireland, The Ulster Museum, The Public Record Office, The Ulster Folk Museum or The Ulster American Folk Park – which was the one for me. The aim was to prepare materials that could be applied to teaching in schools throughout the Province. With the help of John Gilmour, the Folk Park’s Education Officer, I prepared an application and was accepted.

I spent the1987-88 school year travelling two or three times a week to the folk park – in the end it took me an hour and a quarter, sometimes less, to negotiate the Sperrins between Portrush and the Folk Park – and working at home or in libraries.

That work generated “The Green Fields of America” which exists in only two copies, one at the Folk Park, and my one. There are four volumes – 1. Songs, 2. Associated Documents and, 3. Pictures, and a set of Teachers’ Notes that draws the elements together.

Its preface is quite a good summary of my feelings about the use of songs in education. It is posted at Songs in Education – Green Fields of America – The Green Fields of America

Eventually I distilled it into a slim volume Thousands are Sailing: a brief song history of Irish emigration which I published under my own Ulstersongs imprint in 1994. The Preface to that is given below. I still have very few copies and they can be made available; but, at an excessive price.

Thousands are Sailing

a brief song history of Irish emigration

Songs are for singing though many Irish traditional songs are also historical documents. However, they do not tell what happened, they tell what people thought happened. They still do, telling the story both as it was believed and as we believe it.

In the eighteenth century about 250 thousand people left Ireland for North America. They were mainly from Ulster; Protestants of Scottish origin. They left for reasons of commerce, because of unfair tithes and taxation, in response to famines, because Presbyterians were discriminated against and because of itchy feet. In the nineteenth century around 7 000 thousand (7 million) Irish men and women left Ireland for largely the same reasons and a very large number (most authorities, but not all, think most) of them were Roman Catholics from the south and west. They and their Protestant predecessors experienced the same sort of hardship which impelled them to leave Ireland, experienced the same sort of conditions during the voyage (though some of those of the middle nineteenth century were severe in the extreme) and had the same sort of difficulty in establishing themselves in America, the land towards which both groups were attracted because they saw it as free and because of the salesmanship of American entrepreneurs. They were sorry to leave land, friends and relations; their greatest wish was to return home. Those left behind sorrowed too; they waited for letters, they waited for money to assist their survival or to pay their passage. Emigration became a habit; rather than adulthood being marked by a job or by marriage, those who were grown up emigrated as though to prove it.

These ideas are reflected in songs made by local song makers or by those who wrote songs for ballad sheets and these songs have stayed with us, in oral tradition or in collections of ballads in libraries. It is possible to sing a history of Irish emigration; a history which is closer in spirit to the feelings and expression of the ordinary people who endured the experience, than any other kind of historical document. When an emigration song is sung, it imparts not only facts but emotion, and in an especially memorable way. To make the songs from ballad sheets singable I have set them to fairly well-known traditional airs. The ones I chose are not the only ones possible.

Some may object to the evident bias of the songs, fearing that they could be used to inflame prejudice. Yet, every historical document has its bias and is used according to the user’s intentions. This booklet presents twenty songs which can be used to outline the experience, beliefs and feelings of emigrants in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A date or dates has been suggested for each one; most of these are approximate and those marked ? are mere informed guesses. The songs are accompanied by pictures, references to other accounts and to the statistics of emigration, and by references to songs in other collections. Even so, it is too brief an account to be complete and it does have a northern slant. It also concentrates on the North American experience, neglecting Australia, South Africa and other places. It is expected that the readers of a collection like this will be able to spot any lack of balance and correct it for themselves. The only criticism I would take seriously would be that the songs were not worth singing.

John Moulden 24th June 1994

Notes on Books – Contributions to Encyclopaedias – The Companion to Irish Traditional Music (1999) contains a note on Emigration and its influence on the song tradition.

I continued contributing to successive Ulster-American Heritage Symposia and to the annual ‘Literature of Irish Exile’ Winter School at the Ulster-American Folk Park. Aspects of some of these presentations will be posted below.

The piece below appeared in It’s us they’re talking about, the proceedings of the 2005 (CHECK) McGlinchey Summer School that took place in Clonmany in Inishowen each year for the ten years up to 2007. It also bears on another of my headings – Song Cultures – Regional Song Cultures

Songs of Emigration  John Moulden, Portrush

At the McGlinchey Summer School of 2001, I had the privilege of giving the final talk. It came after a panel of local people had talked about their own experiences of leaving home and living in strange places, of being lonely and lost. They had been wonderful. I was conscious that where they had spoken from their hearts and from their experience, I had no such experience; I was just another blow-in academic.

So, I didn’t really give a talk. Instead, I tried to point out that the people of Clonmany Parish, and all the parishes of Ireland had a resource that said more than I, or anyone, could say about what emigration had been like for people who had left Ireland (or been left in Ireland) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I believe that songs tell the story of emigration better than anything else that we have remaining; they tell the people’s story in their own words; they bring the past, fresh and powerful, into the present.

These songs were made by, sung by and kept in memory by ordinary people. They indicate the power that ordinary people have to speak for themselves. I began my talk by regretting that most of the other speakers had gone home. I regretted that they knew so little about songs and their power; that most of them spent so much time talking and so little time listening. One had mentioned the titles of four songs but knew only one of them, Noreen Bawn, and didn’t know that The Maid of Culmore was about Inishowen and well known in the Parish of Clonmany.

I live in Portrush so I can be in Inishowen often. Thanks, mostly, to Jimmy McBride, I have often heard the singers of this area. Once, in the Brass Rail Bar in Buncrana, in October 1990, most of the songs had been about emigration. My talk was centred round the songs and conversation of that day. The first I played was called Thousands are Sailing and had been sung by Denis McDaid from the Isle of Doagh. It served to show how many people left their parish and their native land, what the journey was like and, most importantly something of the feelings of those who went and those who stayed. Here are the words. I’d rather have the song sung – singing presents the emotion in the song – but the words are better than nothing.

 THOUSANDS ARE SAILING TO AMERICA

 You brave Irish people wherever you be
 I pray stand a moment and listen to me
 Our sons and fair daughters are now going away
 When thousands are sailing to America

 CHORUS
 Ah good luck to them now and safe may they land
 They are pushing their way to a far distant strand
 For here in old Ireland no longer can stay
 For thousands are sailing to America

 On the night before leaving bid the neighbours goodbye
 And early next morning their hearts give a sigh
 The tears from their eyes they are falling like rain
 When the horses are starting going off for the train
 CHORUS

 Their friends do assemble and the neighbours also
 When their trunks are packed up and fast ready to go
 They do kiss their mother and with these words do say
 Good-bye darling mother I'm now going away
 CHORUS

 When they do reach the station you'll hear their last cry
 Their handkerchiefs waving and bidding good-bye
 Their father he tells them be sure for to write
 And he watches the train till she goes out of sight
 CHORUS

 They put their foot on the tender just leaving the strand

 And give one look back to their dear native land
 Their hearts are a-breaking for leaving the shore
 Good-bye dear old Ireland will I ne'er see you more
  CHORUS

  It is God help the mother that rears up a child
  It is now for the father he labours and toils
  He tries to support them, he works night and day
  And when they are reared sure they will go away
 Chorus

There is more real history, people’s history, in these songs than in all the books I’ve read. In the same way what Jimmy Grant had to say about his time away from home was fresh. It was about local people and their lives. He talked about songs, he talked about two local men who got on the wrong train in Canada and didn’t find out for six days! That gives a clear idea of a huge country. And he talked about a man called ‘Nougher’ Doherty (there’s no doubt about the Doherty!) from whom he had learned a song called The Leinster Lass. Jimmy said that his brother went, with Nougher Doherty and another Doherty brother, to Western Canada in 1923 – Nougher Doherty afterwards told his experiences by speaking on a tape:

“They went on the train down to Belfast and then across on the steamer to Liverpool and they got on a boat there, they called it the cattle wagon – and they never were on a boat before and he was only nineteen – he might have been the youngest – and they were sixteen days on the boat and sixteen days sick – and he said it was a good job he never had dentures or they’d have been in the bottom of the ocean!” 

People left for many reasons but mostly to have a better life. But, before that, they had to suffer the hardship of the voyage. The most realistic song about this experience was called The Shamrock Shore. Usually this is heard in a short version but singers from both sides of the Foyle have it with a local setting. The words here were sung to Sam Henry in about 1926. The places named are all near Limavady.

 THE SHAMROCK SHORE
 From Londonderry we set sail, all- on the eighth of May;
 We had a sweet and pleasant gale going down to Moville Bay;
 Fresh water there, near twenty tons, for passengers did store,
 Lest we should d want going to St John's, far from the Shamrock Shore.

 That evening at six o'clock, our anchor we did weigh;
 The sunbeams on Benevenagh rocks they splendidly did play;
 Greencastle's ancient church and fort they made my sad heart sore,
 Thinking of when Tyrconnell's court did grace the Shamrock Shore.

 From scene to scene my fond eye roved o'er mountain, hill and dale,
 Till resting on dear Walworth grove o'ertopped by Drumnameal,
 My agonizing heart did swell; my soul was troubled sore,
 Viewing these scenes I had left behind upon the Shamrock Shore.

 Oh, Ballykelly, much loved spot, and must we part, I cried;
 Must I Leave yon lovely cot where friends I love reside;
 Friends of my heart and must we part, perhaps to meet no more,
 Your memory still will warm my heart far from the Shamrock Shore.

 At twelve o'clock we came in famous Malin Head,
 And Innistrahull, far to the right, rose out of ocean's bed;
 A grander sight now met my eyes than e'er I saw before,
 The sun going down 'twixt sea and sky far from the Shamrock Shore.

 Next morning we were all- seasick - not one of us was free;
 Quite helpless on my berth I lay, no one to pity me;
 No friends were near, but strangers drear, to lift my head when sore;
 None of my own to hear me moan far from the Shamrock Shore.

 Then, lo! a dreadful storm arose; the seas like mountains roll;
 Blue lightnings flash on every side, and rush from pole to pole;
 Regardless both of winds and waves and hoarse loud thunder's roar,
 Our gallant crew the tempest braved far from the Shamrock Shore.

 But now these scenes are-, past and gone and we are well once more;
 In social parties we are joined; the whiskey flies galore;
 In joking o'er our parting glass, lest we should meet no more,
 A deuch an dhurrus we will drink far from the Shamrock Shore.

 We landed on the other side in three and thirty days;
 And drinking o'er a parting glass, we took our several ways;
 We took each comrade by the hand, perhaps to meet no more,
 And thought on all our absent friends and the lovely Shamrock Shore.

 To Captain Harrison we owe our grateful thanks indeed;
 Him and his crew were never slow to help us in our need;
 In a full glass we'll drink his health, and toast it o'er and o'er;
 May he still in safety pass to and from the Shamrock Shore. 

There are hundreds of other songs about emigration; they tell what it was like to take the boat and what life was like in America or Canada or Australia. Some of them are sad and angry, some are cheerful and positive. Here is one that regrets the need to leave – it was written originally about a townland near Ballycastle in North Antrim but this version is definitely about Clonmany; this is for Marius Harkin, whose family might be named in it. This is, again, from the Sam Henry Collection.

 THE HILLS OF TANDRAGEE
 When my love wakes in the morning, she oils and combs her hair,
 And dresses in her superfine all for to meet her dear;
 Her name I will not mention, lest she should offended be,
 For she is the fairest creature that dwells in Tandragee.

 The time is drawing nigh, brave lads, when I must leave you here
 And part with all my comrades, likewise my sweetheart dear,
 For her beauty I admire above all that I can see,
 And her killing glances bring the blush on the hills of Tandragee.

 Farewell unto my native rocks, likewise you grand old shore,
 Where with my daily comrades I've trod the sands all o'er,
 And when I'm on the ocean wide, nor house nor home can see,
 I'll be thinking on you, Rosie dear, that dwells in Tandragee.

 When my love wakes in the morning, she walks down to the sea
 To watch for the ship returning that bore her love away;
 She'll watch the foaming billows as they roll in from the sea,
 Saying, 'Oh, poor Johnny Hartin, you're far from Tandragee.' 

These are only three of the songs I played; songs I owe to ordinary people. I hope that I will be able to give them back. If anyone is interested in any of these songs or others, Marius Harkin has ways of contacting me. After the talk was over, I gave copies of a CD of the recordings I’d used to Jimmy McBride, Buncrana, and to Rosemarie Doherty, Dunaff, because I wanted the songs to be in the place they came out of. It was a great privilege to talk to the people of Clonmany, people who know more than I ever will about emigration and whose songs tell it better than I ever will.

John Moulden