“Killarney, Killarney, the place that I love, with its lakes clear and bright as the blue sky above.” The 78 record turned on the radiogram in our dining room, and the lady’s voice sang out about that famous town in Kerry. The Mammy was listening to her Irish songs again. “Where we told love’s sweet story and vowed to be true, I am sighing tonight for Killarney and you.”
Mammy sighed nearly every day for Killarney, and other places to be found on that Western Island from which our family came. There were “The Boys from the County Armagh”, and “The Boys of Wexford”, and of course, pride of place to “The Boys from the County Mayo”. Mayo was Mammy’s native place and the song about her own county made mention of practically every village in the place. The record industry of those years, the 50s, certainly knew how to entice you to buy their product. Any emigrant, back in Ireland for a holiday, would want a souvenir of home when they were returning to England and to their exile.
And so, as we, children, played our games in our house in south Lancashire, in the land of coalmines and cotton mills, the music on the radiogram took us back to Ireland, to the land of endless fields and brown bog and ‘slanty’ rain. We knew the names of towns in Mayo as much as we knew the local places at home. Balla, Ballina, Bohola and Belmullet were as familiar to us as Leigh, Atherton and Tyldesley, where we lived.
Mammy, for all her love of music, couldn’t hold a note to save her life, and so I, as eldest son, and able to sing, found myself called upon to sing these Irish melodies, especially on those occasions when ‘the aunties’, Mammy’s sisters, came to call. I did not need to learn the songs. They were imprinted on my mind by their constant playing in our house. I just had to go and sit at the foot of the stairs – I was concert shy – and sing there for the pleasure and benefit of these women.
Some songs were funny ones, like ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’ and ‘Phil the Fluter’s Ball’, but most were either nostalgic, sad or downright tragic. No wonder I walk about these days with an overdose of nostalgia in me! I have vivid memories of rainy days in Lancashire, when we could not go out to play, and the as the rain slid down the window panes of our dining room, the record on the gramaphone was that old tear-jerker, “The Road By The River”.
“With my little snub nose fastened up to the pane, sadly watching the rain as it made little streams and the road by the river that flows through Raheen.” This particular song would bring tears to a glass eye, as they say, between the wet weather and the heartache of the singer. “Ah sure everything changes, and we change as well…wander back in some well-beloved spot in your dreams, and the road by the river that flows through Raheen.’
The songs were also used as a soporific to lull babies to sleep at night. Evening time found me stationed at the end of the cot – was it Sheila’s or Michael’s or both? – under instructions from Mammy to sing them to sleep with my rendition of ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’. Some times I tried to creep away and back to my play before the little one was asleep, and it was Sheila who used to catch me out, opening her eyes and saying “Come on, Brian, the Wild Colondy Boo!”
All these songs were songs of exile. They were written for people who had to leave home, many of them never to return. My Mammy spent sixty years in England, and she made a happy life there. But she never lost her yearning for her beloved homeland, and she was fortunate in the end to “come back to Erin, mavourneen, mavourneen”. That was another of those songs I had to sing!
Mammy loved music despite her inability to sing it. She felt reassured about me if she heard me singing a song. There were days when I didn’t sing a note, but they are gone now, and the music is back in my life. I think again of the songs I heard at home when I was a child. “And as the years grow longer, I’ll settle down in life, and I’ll find me a nice young Irish girl and I’ll take her to be my wife.” Well, I did that! I met Maggie, born in Dublin, of Sligo family.
My earliest memory of song is on my father’s knee. Daddy had a lovely voice, and sometimes he would sing to me, “Little man you’ve had a busy day.” There is a line in that song about him dying and another daddy coming along, and I used to cry at that and say, “Don’t sing that, Daddy.” ‘Little Pal’ was the name of the song, I think. Al Jolson used to sing it.
Daddy liked his Irish songs and a favourite of his was ‘The Little Old Mud Cabin on the Hill.” Daddy knew great poverty in his early life and I think that song spoke powerfully to him of his own life.
As a very young child, I used to try and sing along to the songs I heard, and after I had finished my song I would say to Mammy, “Wasn’t that doadly shing!” My attempt at saying “a lovely song”. Well, I can still do a fair ‘doadly shing’ and my repertoire is endless.
Would you like to hear ‘The Wild Colondy Boo”?
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Erris Poetry 