St Patrick’s Day! Take a Look at Irish Songs Published in Scotland …

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

In honour of the fact that my McAulay in-laws originated from Ballymoney in Northern Ireland, moving to shipbuilding work in Greenock in the mid-19th century, I thought that this St Patrick’s Day I’d highlight my writing about Irish songs published in Scotland.

Chapter 3 in my latest book (A Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity), deals with ‘The Saleability of Scottish (and Irish) Songs’. The chapter ‘functions as a guide-map to a large genre of national songs published by Scottish music publishers.’  With many Irish workers in industrial Scotland, and another eye on both the Scottish and Irish diaspora, our Glasgow publishers eagerly produced a number of Irish songs books of various kinds, alongside the Scottish books.

Let me share the chapter abstract with you:-

Abstract (A Social History, Chapter 3, pp.56-92)

Examining first the afterlife of Wood’s Songs of Scotland, the chapter next examines the growth of Glasgow firm Bayley & Ferguson, demonstrating how a combination of new works and reprints of saleable older ones built up a significant catalogue, and also noting their involvement with song-collectors and arrangers Afred Moffat and Frank Kidson. It highlights their interest in Highland collections, and also closely examines two of their popular titles, the Scottish Students’ Song Book and subsequent British Students’ Song Book.

The chapter assesses the various Scottish as well as Irish songbooks produced by Scottish publishers, appealing to emigrants as well as British music-lovers, and indicating their clear resolve to produce Irish books which would appeal to both sides of the sectarian divide.

Whilst the primary focus has been on the main Scottish music firms, this chapter concludes by shedding light on some of the lesser ones, and those for whom publishing was a sideline to a primarily retail business.

It may be of interest to note that Robert Wallace, the second owner of James S. Kerr’s, had a connection with Northern Ireland himself: his parents had married in Belfast. His father was Glaswegian, but as I recall, his mother was Irish. (There’s more about the piano-tuner turned publisher Robert Wallace in Chapter 1.)  Kerr’s The Orange Songster is distinctly sectarian, but the much-reported and decidedly humorous court-case between Kerr’s and Mozart Allan hinged on just one particular song: ‘The Ould Orange Flute’.  Wallace published this song first.  Mozart Allan was accused of plagiarism.  You’ll have to read the book for the full story!

A Century Earlier

Irish songs also got a mention in Chapter 5 of my first book (Our Ancient National Airs: Scottish Song Collecting from the Enlightenment to the Romantic Era), too. It’s a chapter on early 19th century metaphor in song book paratexts: ‘Which many a bard had chanted many a day’: Paratextual Imagery and Metaphors in Romantic Celtic Song Collections (pp. 129-148). There are no orange flutes here – but a lot about bards and minstrels, with references to broken harp strings in the context of the United Irish movement.

Silent Harps

The harp that once, thro’ Tara’s halls, the soul of music shed, now hangs as mute on Tara’s walls as if that soul were fled …

Oh! Blame not the bard, if he fly to the bowers […] The string, that now languishes loose o’er the lyre, might have bent a proud bow to the warrior’s dart …

The minstrel boy to the war is gone […] and his wild harp slung behind him. […] The minstrel fell! […] The harp he loved ne’er spoke again …

Two songs by Thomas Moore, and a souvenir from a research trip to Dublin!

Shhh! What Granny Didn’t Want Them to Know

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
The closed lock of an old suitcase

Tracking Irish Emigrants from Cork to USA and London

My third audio book just came up as a new publication when I logged onto Audible. Its title appealed to me. Additionally, since my own [in-the-pipeline] monograph touches upon emigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then if Clair Wills’ book touched upon that, I was definitely interested.

Clair Wills, Missing Persons, or, My Grandmother’s Secrets (Penguin Audible, 2024)

The book describes the author’s extensive efforts to find out more about illegitimate births in her own Irish family; the adults involved, and the secrecy surrounding what had happened. The scandal of the Irish mother-and-baby homes during the twentieth century is naturally a significant focus, but the author also examines the part of the Irish Catholic Church; the local authorities; adoption; single mothers; questions of respectability and inheritance; of shame; of emigration (to America, and to England); of stigma and suicide; along with changing attitudes towards the end of the twentieth century. Since I’m neither Irish nor Roman Catholic, I was sure it would be informative – and it was.

It’s a moving, and multi-faceted narrative. Just when I was beginning to ask myself, ‘So, if the mother-and-baby homes were a twentieth century scandal, what happened before that?’, Wills explains how things gradually changed from the second half of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, along with the political changes. The unbearable tragedies for the mothers and babies were too many to enumerate, but we’re reminded that the outcome for a young Irishman fleeing to life as an itinerant labourer in England was hardly what any young adult man would have hoped for, either.

Did any of this have any bearing on my own research? Not really, except to provide me with some statistics about emigration from Ireland that were far higher than I had imagined – and I already knew they were high. Moreover, my own musicological research really only requires me to say, ‘There was a lot of emigration from the Highlands and Ireland, usually for work.’ After all, I write about national songbooks, and their appeal to emigrants. If I was going to give more detail, I could, I suppose, add, ‘and sometimes, especially in Ireland, to make a fresh start where an illegitimate pregnancy made it expedient for either party.’ But to be honest, songs about missing your homeland – or even your sweetheart back in the old country – aren’t likely to go into specifics about babies born in inconvenient circumstances.

However, reading Audible books during a period of forced inactivity, doesn’t mean they have to be connected with research. It’s an unaccustomed luxury to listen to books for hours on end, and I’d recommend this one. I have six more titles lined up, but I don’t think I’ll start them today. I like to let the memory of one sink in, before beginning another.