Folk Music

Over the Hills and Far Away

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

 

I’m not the martial type and have no temperament, time nor tolerance for militarism as a political creed, but one of my favourite folk music records is a 1970, long out of print vinyl album called Songs and Music of the Redcoats. Never re-issued on CD, it is hard to find – but English folksinger Martyn Wyndham-Read kindly sent me a copy a decade or two ago. Its sequel, The Valiant Sailor: Songs & Ballads of Nelson’s Navy, followed in 1973.

The songs range from the English Civil War to the Boer War, in which the red coat was replaced by khaki, and all the wars between. The War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years War (in America, the French and Indian War), the American War of Independence, the French Revolutionary War, the Crimean and Afghan Wars, the Indian Mutiny, the Sudan wars, and the South African War. Standouts for me are The Girl I Left Behind Me,  which dates back to 1758,  The British Soldier, with its ominous line, “we marched into Kabul and we took the Balar Hizar”, Soldiers of the Queen, which enjoyed immense popularity during the South African War, and in latter days, in the film Breaker Morant, and Stand to Your Glasses Steady, a memento mori of the prevalence of death, most often from disease, in the service of the East India Company. The featured image is from Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film Barry Lyndon, set during the Seven Years War.

But my favourite was Over the Hills and Far Away.

Then let us list and march, I say …

This traditional English marching song has been around for four centuries, probably originating during the War of the Spanish Succession. It was published in Thomas D’Urfey’s Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy in 1706 and appeared in The Recruiting Officer in 1706, a comedy by George Farquhar, and in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in 1728. The lyrics refer to the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), the Duke of Marlborough, and Queen Anne of England (1665 -1714).

It recalls a time when poor men joined the army out of need and the rich for glory, and when many a young man “took the king’s shilling” or bought an officer’s commission to fight in foreign wars for king or queen and country and to perish far away from home in “far away places with strange sounding names”.

So far away from home: the last stand of the 44th Foot at Gandamak during the disastrous First Afghan War of 1842.

It was very popular in Colonial and Revolutionary America, with both sides singing their own versions. The song remained popular throughout the British Empire although nowadays, its melody serving as an orchestral leitmotif in many movies, including the 1940 Hollywood classic, Northwest Passage which starred Spencer Tracy as Major Robert Rogers, leading is Rangers through French lines during the Seven Years War (1756-1763) to attack an Indian village allied to the French. But it largely faded from public consciousness, until its use in the television adaptation of Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series of the 1990s about the green-jacketed Rifles soldiers. I’ve heard the tune is also used in Morris dancing.

British Soldier 1702, Robert Payton gallery: http://orloprat.deviantart.com

Winter Soldier 1702, Robert Payton

Batlle scene from Waterloo, 1970

The song may have actually originated in a nursery rhyme. Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son” mentions a piper who knows only one tune, this one, although the children’s rhyme may have itself may have started actually started its life on the stagy, written for but not included) in Thomas D’Urfey’s 1698 play The Campaigners. This is the version we sang in primary school in late fifties Birmingham:

Tom, Tom, the piper’s son,
He learnt to play when he was young,
The only tune that he could play
Was ‘over the hills and far away’;
Over the hills and a great way off,
The wind shall blow my top-knot off.

The words have changed over the years, the only consistent element in early versions being the title line and the tune. D’Urfey’s and Gay’s versions both refer to lovers, while Farquhar’s version refers to fleeing overseas to join the army, whilst Gay’s lyrics reference transportation and indentured labour in the American colonies – which is an altogether different and largely untold story.

MacHeath:
Were I laid on Greenland’s coast,
And in my arms embrac’d my lass;
Warm amidst eternal frost,
Too soon the half year’s night would pass.
And I would love you all the day.
Ev’ry night would kiss and play,
If with me you’d fondly stray
Over the hills and far away.

Polly:
Were I sold on Indian soil,
Soon as the burning day was clos’d,
I could mock the sultry toil
When on my charmer’s breast repos’d.
I would love you all the day.
Ev’ry night would kiss and play,
If with me you’d fondly stray
Over the hills and far away.

My favourite version is by English folksinger Martin Wyndham-Read. Based on Farquar’s song, it is well sung with a melodic and measured martial fife or flute accompaniments. Wyndham-Read renders it wistful, poignant, nostalgic, romantic even. It is in itself a perfect recruitment advertisement, part patriotic, part propaganda – the two often operate in unison – promising not only financial reward to folk in straightened circumstances, but camaraderie in a noble purpose, and to riff the Bard of Avon, a “happy few”, a “band of brothers”.

Hark now the drums beat up again
For all true soldier gentlemen,
Then let us list and march, I say,
Over the Hills and far away.

(Chorus)
Over the hills and o’er the main
To Flanders, Portugal and Spain,
Queen Anne commands and we’ll obey,
Over the hills and far away.

All gentlemen that have a mind,
To serve the queen that’s good and kind,
Come list and enter into pay,
Then over the hills and far away.

No more from sound of drum retreat,
While Marlborough and Galway beat
The French and Spaniards every day,
When over the hills and far away.

The song is at 5.18 on the YouTube video below. It is a recording of the full album, so indulge yourselves and listen to it in its entirety. The Sharpe version, below, is also based on Farquhar’s, acquiring new lyrics for successive episodes. It was recorded by John Tams who played Dan Hagman in the series.

If I should fall to rise no more
As many comrades did before
Then ask the fifes and drums to play
Over the Hills and Far Away

Postscript- Irish soldiers

By happenstance, as I was completing this post, I was reading The Great Hunger, published in 1962, by English historian Cecil Woodham-Smith (well known back in the day for The Reason Why, her acclaimed story of the Charge of the Light Brigade). It is, she wrote, “a curious contradiction, not very often remembered by England, that for many generations, the private soldiers of the British Army were largely Irish. The Irish have natural endowments for war, courage, daring, love of excitement and conflict; McCauley described Ireland as “an exhaustible nursery of the finest soldiers”. Poverty and lack of opportunity at home made the soldier’s shilling a day, and the chance of foreign Service, attractive to the Irishman; and the armies of which England is proud, the troops who broke the power of Napoleon in the Peninsula and defeated him at Waterloo, which fought on the scorching plains of India, stormed the heights of the Alma in the Crimean campaign, and planted the British flag in every quarter of the globe in a hundred forgotten engagements, were largely, indeed in many cases, mainly Irish”.

It has been estimated that during the American War of Independence, 16% of the rank and file in the British Army, and 31% of the commissioned officers, were Irishmen. There were indeed Irishmen fighting on both sides (Scots too, as portrayed in the final few series of that entertaining Highland fling, Outlander). In following years, the Irish would swell the ranks to the extent that by 1813 the British Army’s total manpower was estimated to be half English, a sixth Scottish and a third Irish.

For other posts about folk song in In That Howling Infinite, see: The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir; Mo Ghile Mear in Irish myth and melody; O’Donnell Abú – the Red Earl and history in a song; Over the sea to Skye, and Outlander – if I didna hae bad luck, I’d hae no luck at all …

In addition to Songs and Music of the Redcoats and The Valiant Sailor: Songs & Ballads of Nelson’s Navy, I would also highly recommend Strawhead’s 1987 album Law Lies Bleeding (see below). My own marching song, The Marching Song of the New Republic is also included below.

© Paul Hemphill 2024.  All rights reserved.

Deconstructing Donald – translating Trumpspeak

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

“America is in a mess. We need someone to clean it up. And his name is …”

So run the opening titles of Tim Robbin’s’ 1992 satire Bob Roberts. In a dark case of life imitating art, the story of a Wall Street millionaire who begins his political career as a reactionary folk singer foreshadows the rise of a uniquely American autocrat who channels the pain and anger of millions who feel that they’ve been left behind. The eponymous Bob Roberts is portrayed as a rightwing Bob Dylan, right down to a parody of the famous Subterranean Homesick Blues story boards to the iconoclastic song Times are a’changin’ … Back. Read a 2020 retrospective of this prescient film HERE


False prophets and siren songs

The only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion,”When a man unprincipled in private life[,] desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper … is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity … It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind. Alexander Hamilton to George Washington in 1792.

One cannot and ought not underestimate the power and sheer durability of populism – a political style offering unworkably simple solutions to complex problems, an ebullient rejection of elite expertise in defense of homespun obscurantism. It is a particularly attractive to the many who cleave to populism, nativism, tribalism and atavism, and equate these with nationalism and patriotism – and feel that, nay believe that they’ve been ignored by the powers that be and left behind in life’s rat-race. Trust is in short supply, and indeed, people’s faith in democratic traditions and processes is shaking as populism and a taste for autocracy spreads throughout the ostensibly democratic world. And as the old epigram runs, “cometh the hour, cometh the man” …

We live, it feels, in a time of false prophets. A generation of different and dangerous populists now moves to centre stage. Some like Trump, are undisguised in their racial, sexist and selfish pitches. Trump knows the key to being a successful fraud is to be a grand fraud. He pledges “to make America great again” and wins wide applause. This is because he is an anti-politician, shaking the system, abusing the established politicians, trashing their ideas. He thrives on shock and extravagance in a culture drunk with mindless celebrity. He stands for economic nationalism, trade protectionism, xenophobic hostility,  towards Muslims particularly and a US strategic withdrawal from the world and much of its alliance system. As a wannabe autocrat, he admires actual autocrats, whom, he believes get things done because they break the rules and brook no dissent or contradiction. Nor Americans too averse to the prospect of an American strongman. For decades, polls have suggested that many Americans prefer the smack of strong leadership, even at the cost of jettisoning democratic norms. Back in the mid-1990s, for example, one in 16 Americans thought that a military dictatorship would be a “good” or “very good” thing. By 2014, two years before Trump’s shock victory over Hillary Clinton, that figure had leapt to one in six.

Trump is the vessel through which vast numbers of angry Americans can  channel their rage with the establishment. Back in March 2023, he told a Texas rally: “For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution!” His ascent reflects not so much his political brilliance but the absolute contempt an increasing share of Americans have for the nation’s institutions. Hugh Hewitt, in an opinion piece in The Washington Post, wrote recently: “Trump’s fervent supporters continue to believe he is a noble Jean Valjean of American politics being pursued by a mob of Javerts”. Columnist Maureen Dowd is more blunt: “His hallucinatory worshippers admire him as a strongman, even when he’s shown to be liable for sexual assault and an aggrandising con man whose real estate empire was a Potemkin village”.

Irish writer Fintan O’Toole wrote in the New York Review of Book on January 19th how Trump “… exudes a dark energy. His is perhaps the most radical mainstream presidential candidacy in US history. He offers a program of organized revenge, telling his fans that “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” He promises a transformation of democracy into authoritarianism. He envisages a war on all the “vermin” who have thwarted him. He plans, as The New York Times has reported, “to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.” He wants to build giant camps to house those awaiting deportation and to vet would-be travelers to the US for political (and presumably also religious) purity: “US consular officials abroad will be directed to expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block people the Trump administration considers to have undesirable attitudes.” The relentlessness of this determination to reshape the US into an autocracy may be horrifying, but it has the vigor of grand ambition”.

Small wonder the US was recently named a “backsliding democracy” by a Swedish based think-tank, an assessment based on the attempted Capitol coup and restrictions on voting rights in Red states.

Trump could well win, against Biden or against another candidate. The issues he’s running on – illegal immigration, the cost of living, lawlessness and crime – are huge and real. Trump may defeat himself if he campaigns about the injustices done to him. If he campaigns on issues as the champion of ordinary Americans, he’s got a big chance. He is is both instinctively talented as a campaigner but also capable of grievous self harm through wildly undisciplined statements – as with NATO – and narcissistic self-absorption. Driven by grievance and will to power, and behaving, some say, like a mafia boss, he is in so many ways lawless and dangerous.

So dangerous indeed, that many pundits believe that individually, many of his positions and actions, actual and promised, pose existential threats to the United States and its institutions that are far more threatening than any concerns raised by Biden’s age. Some rush to remind Americans of the time when Benjamin Franklin, one of the original framers of the US Constitution, was walking out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and someone shouted out, “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” To which Franklin supposedly responded, with a rejoinder at once witty and ominous: “A republic, if you can keep it.” 

If once elected, and at a second or third election outvoted by one or two votes, he will pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government, be supported by the States voting for him. Thomas  Jefferson to James Madison in 1787

[The quotations of the founding fathers come courtesy of Jeffrey Rosen, The Washington Post]

Found in translation …

British writer and columnist Gerard Baker does not agree with these latter day Cassandras. I republish below an entertaining and informative article written by this self-ordained translator of Trumpspeak, who describes himself as a “right-wing curmudgeon, writer and media critic. Actually, he is quite Right, a Eurosceptic and according to some, a closet Trumpista. But his piece is quite perceptive.

“Parsing Donald Trump is a uniquely difficult linguistic task …There are multiple layers of challenge. First, you can never have more than 50 per cent confidence that what he is saying is true. Second, much of what he says is intended to entertain, rather than inform or inspire. Third, and most confoundingly, the meaning of what he says is often quite different from the actual content.

In what must be the only feature of Trump’s ministry on earth that is like that of Jesus Christ’s, the former president speaks in parables. Unlike Christ’s, Trump’s stories are primarily designed to showcase his own greatness but, crucially, like the Son of Man’s, they also convey an important larger message … in focusing just on the words – and frequently distorting them – to paint a picture of a deranged despot, they [his critics] miss the meaning, the meta-story, if you like. That is a problem because it means they miss a critical part of understanding what is happening in America.

The truth about Trump and his enduring appeal to so many Americans is that, beyond the unsettling mix of Borscht-belt schtick and Munich-beerhall menace, beyond the verbal minefields of untruths, half-truths and narcissistic bombast, is a serious message channeling the reasonable fears and doubts of at least half the country … Trump understands better than anyone the dissatisfaction of Americans, their weariness with burdens …Trump’s greatest political asset has always been an almost animal-like ability to sniff out public sentiment, and then, in hyperbolic manner, to articulate it; sentiments on immigration, crime or American self-identity that are unsayable, willfully ignored by the established political class”.

© Paul Hemphill 2024.  All rights reserved.

For more in In That Howling Infinite on American politics, see My Country ’tis of Thee

Trump flogging joggers at Sneaker Con, February 2024


Trumpspeak crazy but attuned to Americans’ dissatisfaction with their burdens

Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump raises his fist at an event in Iowa in January. Picture: AFP

The Republican presidential hopeful at an event in Iowa in January.  AFP

Parsing Donald Trump is a uniquely difficult linguistic task. There are multiple layers of challenge. First, you can never have more than 50 per cent confidence that what he is saying is true. Second, much of what he says is intended to entertain, rather than inform or inspire. Third, and most confoundingly, the meaning of what he says is often quite different from the actual content.

In what must be the only feature of Trump’s ministry on earth that is like that of Jesus Christ’s, the former president speaks in parables. Unlike Christ’s, Trump’s stories are primarily designed to showcase his own greatness but, crucially, like the Son of Man’s, they also convey an important larger message. The task of parsing this is so complicated that much of the media doesn’t even try. As with Pavlov’s dog, Trump rings their bell and away they go, barking like mad about some terrifying new thing the man is threatening.

“It is impacting the flow of support,” the NATO Secretary General said on Wednesday afternoon after a two-day meeting of defence ministers in Brussels. “To some extent, this can be compensated by increased support from… other allies. And European allies and Canada are stepping up, are doing more.
It’s understandable but in focusing just on the words – and frequently distorting them – to paint a picture of a deranged despot, they miss the meaning, the meta-story, if you like. That is a problem because it means they miss a critical part of understanding what is happening in America.

The truth about Trump and his enduring appeal to so many Americans is that, beyond the unsettling mix of Borscht-belt schtick and Munich-beerhall menace, beyond the verbal minefields of untruths, half-truths and narcissistic bombast, is a serious message channeling the reasonable fears and doubts of at least half the country.

So when the permanently unfinished Rubik’s cube of Trump’s mind last weekend produced another multisided Technicolor shocker of an outburst – this time on the subject of the US and NATO – the media as usual gave us the version they wanted us to hear: “Trump says he would encourage Russia to invade NATO countries who do not pay their bills,” says the headline on a story that is still on the BBC website. “I want Russia to invade Europe” in other words.

The first thing to point out is that Trump didn’t say this. He was instead recounting a story from his presidency – telling a campaign audience that when he was pressing European governments to spend more on their own defence, he was asked by a NATO country leader if the US would still protect them from Russian invasion if they didn’t pay up.

“No, I would not. In fact I would encourage them to do whatever they hell they wanted,” he said.

As your reliable translator of Trumpspeak, I’ll say there are three key takeaways from this. First, it didn’t happen. Don’t you think we might have heard about this some time in the past five years if it did?

Second, the point of the story is primarily to emphasise Trump’s own negotiating prowess. This has always been central to his bloated self-image. From casino construction to global security, it’s always about his unique ability to get the deal done. The irony is that the point of Trump’s story was precisely the opposite of what’s been said about it – instead of representing the end of NATO, it is about how (in his own mind) Trump saved the alliance with an act of bravado that forced Europeans to action.

But the most important truth in this fictional story is that Trump understands better than anyone the dissatisfaction of Americans, their weariness with burdens.

Trump’s greatest political asset has always been an almost animal-like ability to sniff out public sentiment, and then, in hyperbolic manner, to articulate it; sentiments on immigration, crime or American self-identity that are unsayable, wilfully ignored by the established political class.

One of these is the idea that the world Americans inhabit is dramatically changed. It is 75 years since the founding of NATO, more than 30 years since the end of the Cold War. It is remarkable how little the foreign policy establishment in the US, or America’s allies, understand the world as it appears to Americans themselves.

This is obviously true of the conspectus of global threats. In this century, first Islamist terrorism and then the rise of China have imposed themselves on the American consciousness. It’s true that NATO allies were reliable contributors to the war in Afghanistan. But that ended in disarray and disillusion – hardly an advertisement for the power of the alliance.

But more important than all that is Americans’ own, very new, sense of their own precariousness. This is not just about the changing global threats but their confidence in the success of their own country.

For more than two decades, with very brief exceptions, the vast majority of Americans have told pollsters they think their country is on the wrong track. For the first time in history most Americans think their children will be worse off than they are.

In these circumstances NATO is increasingly seen not as a critical part of America’s own security but as a costly obligation to others. The statistics – a US that contributes well beyond its economic resources – tell only half the story.

With a few exceptions, most European nations would be unable and even unwilling to stand up to an aggressor. Americans watch as Europeans have grown prosperous but dependent on US security and they resent the obligation, particularly from Europeans who seem to go out of their way to express disdain for America.

This isn’t 1930s isolationism, which reaped its own whirlwind in the 1940s. America then was an emerging superpower reluctant to get into another world war.

Today Americans see themselves as a nation in decline, under siege from global forces – uncontrolled immigration streaming across their southern border, terrorists pledging to murder them at home and abroad, a rising nuclear-armed superpower across the Pacific. And they don’t see where NATO fits in.

Trump’s words are typically extreme. Don’t let the crazy blind you to the deeper message.

The Times

Goosestepping back to political relevance

Outlander – if I didna hae bad luck, I’d hae no luck at all …

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

History can’t be trusted
Brianna Randall

It’s good I’m Scottish. I’m Scottish. I am Scottish.
I can complain about things, I can really complain about things.
Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor, discovers he has a Scottish accent

The pipes, the pipes are calling …

Well, after nearly a decade, we heard them at last and surrendered to Outlander  

The promise of exotic Celtic locations, steamy sex scenes, and graphic violence was too irresistible – all this and the fact that we’d run out of tempting things to watch on Foxtel, SBS and Netflix … And so we settled down to seven and a half seasons of the celebrated time-shifting highland fling (before bingeing on Game of Thrones for the umpteenth time).

If you’re into stories with eye-candy, period costume, great music, loads of gratuitous violence and soft porn garnished with some history, this one’s for you. It’s a bit like reading Playboy for the stories.

And, of course, there’s time-travel, a perennial fantasy and science fiction trope. Nor is time travel involving Scotland original. The many incarnations of Doctor Who have made many visits to Scotland during their adventures. Way back in 1966 The Highlanders saw Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor arrive in the Scottish Highlands in 1746 just after the Battle of Culloden. It was here that The Doctor met Jamie McCrimmon (actually, Yorkshire actor, Frazer Hines), a piper of the Clan MacLeod who would go on to be a regular and popular companion to the Doctor. Since then, there have been four Scottish Doctors and many Scottish lead characters. American author Diana Gabaldon says she created the Outlander stories (on which the series is based – there are nine of them) after watching Hines in Doctor Who and based her leading man on him. Hines actually has a role in Season 1, episode 11.

Fraser Hines as Jamie, 1966

The Whovian Paradox

So, here we were, time-hopping back and forth between 1745 and 1945, the ‘45 Scottish Highland rising and the end of WWII, and then, naturally, the American colonies before and during the American War of Independence, the late nineteen sixties and early eighties. The traffic at the magical stone rings of Craigh na Dun, somewhere near Inverness (they’re actually on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides) and North Carolina (apparently, they’re styrofoam) reaches rush hour proportions as one, two, one again, three and four, family members and other sundry “travelers” pass to and fro’.

The title of this piece, as everybody ought to know, is borrowed from the old blues song Born Under A  Bad Sign, immortalised, of course by the best music cal trio ever, Cream. It describes perfectly a narrative arc which follows a “Groundhog Day” formula. The heroine Clare Fraser late of 1945, a former WWII battlefield nurse, after washing up lands in the Scottish Highlands in1744, is captured by British Army Redcoats, press-ganged by the Royal Navy, arrested by colonial vigilantes, almost burnt for a witch by superstitious puritans, and has sex with Bonnie Prince Charlie, and is serially rescued in the nick of time by her husband, rebellious and handsome highlander Jamie Fraser. Jamie is captured, arrested, flogged, enslaved, kidnapped and worse, and is rescued, in the nick of time by his resilient spouse. This happens numerous times, with sundry villains outwitted, overcome and served their just desserts – with plenty of time in between for many interminable sex-scenes (why take five minutes of screen time when you’ve seven seasons to fill), and one excruciatingly graphic and gratuitous episode of sexual violence which, counting flashbacks, must’ve taken up to a hour or more of screen time. It must have caused consumer conniptions because by series seven, the show runners had seriously toned down the adult content.

Their ill-starred son in law Roger Mackenzie endures a similar helter-skelter ride as he embarks on a literal “hero’s journey” from academic and folksinger to preacher to late twentieth century “househusband” – his adventures including being press-ganged by pirates, “sold” to native Americans, and fighting successively for the British army and the insurgent Continental Army. 

For all the back and forth, the melodramatic fol-de-rol, the surfeit of rumpy-pumpy and violence, and the gorgeous highland and American scenery, as a historical and well-costumed drama, it presents a well-researched and historically accurate – if simplified – portrayal of society and politics leading up to the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745-46, including a brutal reenactment of the Battle of Culloden, the last battle fought on British soil, and the American Revolutionary War, of the French court at Versailles, of medical techniques in the 18th Century (Clare is an experienced battlefield nurse and qualified twentieth century doctor), and of the original sins that still haunt the United States today: the institution of slavery and the fate of the indigenous Americans. There are many historical characters including an unflattering portrayal of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the leader of the Jacobite forces and a more sympathetic George Washington (but not his alleged wooden teeth), and a brief cameo for the not get treasonous Benedict Arnold. 

There was an original and to my mind amusing walk on role which may have gone over the heads of most viewers, particularly as no reference is made to her back story. When Charles Stewart was on the run after Culloden, he was aided in his flight by minor aristocrat Flora MacDonald who was subsequently arrested for her role and consigned to the Tower of London, but later amnestied. She married an army captain also named McDonald, and they later emigrated to the American colonies. Her captain served with the British forces during the American War of Independence, and as a result, their property was confiscated. They relocated to Canada and soon, after, returned to Scotland.  

One early criticism I had of Outlander was that the highlanders all spoke Scottish Gaelic. Not that I’ve a problem with the tongue because it’s a beautiful language and I wish I could’ve learned Gaelic it in the past , and indeed it was my Irish mother’s native language, though she lost it after years of living in England. But because there were no subtitles. I realized very soon that this was intentional as it emphasised just how alien the whole scene must’ve been to English Claire, dependent upon Jamie, who, like Mel Gibson’s William Wallace, was multilingual, and a handful of bilingual clansmen to understand what was being said around and about her. Jamie’s pet name for her is Sassenach, meaning foreigner or, yes, Outlander, derived from the English saxonīs or saxons, and to Catholic highlanders, protestants of the Anglican persuasion. By the second season, to borrow from Jamie, I “dinnae fash”.

Many books and films of the fantasy genre have endeavoured to resolve what one could call the Whovian Paradox – the desire to go back and change history for the better. But, as the ever-regenerating Doctor himself always cautioned his constantly changing and ever-enthusiastic companions, you can’t just go back and alter history.  We’ve seen it often in films like Terminator, 12 Monkeys and Looper.  For all its melodrama and conjecture, Outlander manages to weave, at times clumsily, through the conundrums and contradictions. But no spoilers here … 

Songs of Rebellion 

Now, let’s talk about the music. The Outlander books by Diana Gabaldon make constant references to songs and music from the periods in which the stories are set, be these eighteenth century Scotland and America or the twentieth century. The series’ soundtrack created by American composer and musician Bear McCreary works well in providing a sense of place and time. As an old folkie of Celtic blood, I enjoyed hearing snippets of songs and tunes that I’ve known since childhood, including Marie’s Wedding and Johnny Cope.

The main theme, in the opening TikTok’s, and as a leitmotif throughout story  is the ersatz Jacobite song Over The Sea to Skye. It’s a grand old song, and I’ve written about it before:

There are many folk songs that we are convinced are authentically “traditional”, composed in the days gone by an unknown hand and passed down to us by word of mouth and then, perhaps, by broadsheets and handbills, rustic kitchens and Victorian parlours, until finally pressed into vinyl during the mid-twentieth century folk revival. And yet many such songs were indeed written by poets and songwriters of variable fame. One such is The Skye Boat Song. 

This famous song is one of many inspired by the Scottish Jacobite Rising against Protestant England’s rule in 1745. It recalls the journey of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, “Bonny Prince Charlie”, from Benbecula to the Isle of Skye as he evaded capture by government troops after his defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. The Jacobite Rebellion was sparked by many political, cultural and economic factors. but essentially, it was a dynastic civil war. 

Songwriter and philanthropist Sir Harold Boulton, 2nd Baronet composed the lyrics to an air collected by Anne Campbelle MacLeod in the 1870s. According to Andrew Kuntz, a collector of folk music lore, MacLeod was on a trip to the isle of Skye and was being rowed over Loch Coruisk (Coire Uisg, the “Cauldron of Waters”) when the rowers broke into a Gaelic rowing song “Cuachag nan Craobh” (“The Cuckoo in the Grove”). MacLeod set down what she remembered of the air, with the intention of using it later in a book she was to co-author with Boulton.

It was first published in 1884 Around 1885 the famed author Robert Louis Stevenson, considering Boulton’s lyrics words “ unworthy”, composed verses “more in harmony with the plaintive tune”. Purged of Jacobite content, these mentioned neither Charlie nor Culloden.

Boulton’s is the one that endured, along with the sentimental perspective Bonny Prince Charlie

But historical fact has never dimmed the popularity of the song. It is often played as a slow lullaby or waltz in many and varied contexts including soundtracks, including Outlander (adapting the text of the text Robert Lewis Stevenson’s poem “Sing Me a Song of a Lad That Is Gone” (1892).

Billow and breeze, islands and seas,
Mountains of rain and sun,
All that was good, all that was fair,
All that was me is gone.

The rendering of the song changes through the seasons, with female and male solos, a capella and choral. The most poignant is that of season 7, featuring as it does Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor, who passed away this July , not long after the season aired fir the first time. Listen to it below. 

There was another piece that was used to excellent and atmospheric effect in the lead up to the Battle of Culloden. Bear McCreary has written: “To properly underscore these episodes, I needed a song that was written during the Jacobite uprising as opposed to after it, a song that makes no comment about loss, only promises of victory.
 I turned to famed Scottish composer and music historian John Purser, who was gracious with his time and assembled a collection a historically-accurate songs for me. I was immediately drawn to the soaring melody in Moch Sa Mhadainn, song composed by Scottish Gaelic poet Alasdair mac Mghaighstir Alasdair (known in English as Alexander MacDonald), a member of Clan MacDonald of Clanranald). A celebrated poet of the Jacobite era, Alasdair composed this song upon hearing the news that Prince Charles Edward Stuart had landed at Glenfinnan. That was perfect!  When Jamie opens the letter in “The Fox’s Lair” and learns he has been roped into the revolution, this song was actually being composed somewhere in Scotland at that very moment.“ Moch sa Mhadainn ‘s Mi a’ Dùsgadh (Early As I Awaken), also known as Oran Eile Don Phrionnsa (Song to the Prince) or Clan Ranald’s Welcome. I have published it at the end of this post.

A Scottish footnote

The two Scottish rebellions of the 18th century were as much civil wars as insurrections against the English Crown. Lowland Scots of the south were against the highlanders of the north. Catholics fought Presbyterians – but many Protestants fought the Crown, a legacy perhaps of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth, the Restoration in the previous century. Clan chiefs allied themselves to the Crown or to the Jacobite cause based upon family ties and self interest. The Crown’s forces at Culloden contained many Scottish soldiers, including senior commanders. Irish Catholic forces who had no love for protestant England fought on the side of the Jacobites. The forces who tracked down the rebels after the battle were often Scots, as were the soldiers and officers carrying out the reprisals and infamous Highland Clearances that followed – the latter being dictated by economics as much as politics, often in the interests of Glasgow and Edinburgh landowners who wanted the land cleared of residents so they could run lucrative sheep farms. A larger than life character like the celebrated Rob Roy MacGregor was very much a charming scoundrel who always had some sort of scheme going, and like most clan leaders, he had contacts in the highest places, including the palace.

I recently rewatched a televisual recreation of the battle of Culloden that I’d first seen in 1964 by British film maker Peter Watkins. For its time, it was a well-balanced account, featuring “interviews” with the principal protagonists on both sides, an engrossing narrative, and some pretty harrowing scenes of the carnage inflicted on the Highland forces by the well-armed and well-trained Redcoats. There is a link to the full film below. 

The Jacobite Rebellion itself was sparked by many political, cultural and economic factors. but essentially, it was a dynastic civil war. The battle on Culloden Moor dashed for two and a half centuries the Scots’ dreams of independence. Charles Edward Stuart, the “Young Pretender” to the Protestant Hanoverian English throne that once belonged to the Roman Catholic Stuart clan, fled into exile in France. And that’s where he remained, although his last resting place is in the crypt of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome – an ironic ending for this could’ve been champion of Catholic hopes. Bonny Prince Charlie had many romantic and rousing songs written about him. But in reality he wasn’t the dashing, gallant leader that the songs portrayed and that the Scots and their Celtic Irish allies yearned for. He was an indecisive and vacillating leader who thought himself much cleverer and popular than he actually was. portrayal in Outlander is most unflattering. When the going got rough, he got going – and left the the Scots and Irish who supported him with blood and treasure to the tender mercies of the Sassenach foe”.

And yet, the songs live on to this day, most notably in The Skye Boat Song, Mo Gile Mear, Will Ye No Come Back Again. The old and well-recorded favourite Óró sé do bheatha ‘bhaile has also been associated with the Jacobite cause as Séarlas Óg (“Young Charles” in Gaelic). The poet Padraig Pearse, leader of the doomed intifada we know as the Easter Rising of 1916, added new verses, and so the song entered the rebel canon.

Thou art the choicest of all rulers
Here’s a health to thy returning,
Charlie His the royal blood unmingled
Great the modesty in his visage
Moch Sa Mhadainn (Song to the Prince)

The Jacobites: ‘Don’t let romanticism obscure the threat they posed

Alison Campsie, 19th Nov 2020

 
The Battle of Culloden as depicted by Swiss painter David Morier, who was paid a pension by the Duke of Cumberland, the commander of the British Army at the battle. PIC: Creative Commons.
The Battle of Culloden, David Morier, who was paid a pension by the Duke of Cumberland, the commander of the British Army at the battle. PIC: Creative Commons.

The romanticism of Jacobites should not obscure the threat they posed to the British Army in the years following the Battle of Culloden, a leading historian has said.

Professor Murray Pittock, Pro Vice Principal at Glasgow University, said that Jacobites had to be contained “so extensively, and so completely” after the battle in April 1746 with some 12,000 British Army soldiers remaining in Scotland – around 25 per cent of the regular army’s strength at the time.

They soldiers were stationed in 400 cantonment camps – from forts to staging posts – from Lerwick to the Western Isles and from Aberdeen to Gretna, with 60 patrols remaining in Scotland a decade after the battle.

 
Professor Pittock, in an online lecture hosted by History Scotland magazine, said: “Although Jacobitism became romanticized, that romanticism should not be obscured by its reality.
 
“Its reality was that it had to be contained so extensively in such a prolonged way and so completely.”
 
He added: “Although the Jacobites became romanticised the romanticisation was itself a reaction to the seriousness of the threat it was seen as posing at the time.

“Romanticism kept the Jacobites alive but it also kept it at a safe distance.”

Prof Pittock noted that around 1,000 Jacobites died at Culloden with another 2,000 killed in the days that followed given the army’s ‘licence to kill’ supporters of the cause.

Soldiers were paid 16 guineas for the capture of Jacobite colours and 2s and 6d for every Jacobite musket or broadsword seized, Prof Pittock said.

He added that Cumberland and his commanders rotated their soldiers every three months in order to prevent connections being forged with local people.

 

Their longer term role was to police ‘Highland dress’, protect the collection of taxes and “overawe the local population”.

But residents chose not to help the soldiers in some cases with a report from Glen Dessary noting that ‘the people are unwilling to part with any provisions’ for the forces.

Desertions were not uncommon, with two deserters from Pulteney’s Regiment sentenced to death. However, it was decided that one should be spared, with a roll of a dice determining who should live, research by Prof Pittock found.

He pointed to the building of Fort George at Arderseir, which served as a British Army garrison from 1757, which cost around £2m to build at a time when Britain was heading into the Seven Years War while servicing a massive national debt.

“What that should tell us that whatever people might think about the Jacobite cause being romanticised, or it being wrong, it was not what their enemies thought at the time,” Prof Pittock added.

“That is extremely important. You cannot understand Jacobitism by looking down the wrong end of a telescope,” he said.

Details of the British Army occupation of Scotland following Culloden have also been brought to light by the Stennis Historical Society, which has researched and digitised hundreds of records of cantonment camps set up across the country post-Culloden.

The Jacobites who fought on after Culloden

The Scotsman, 16th Apr 2019

The battle was lost, the rising was over, and the rebels were told by their leader to go home. But for hundreds of Jacobites, the fight was still on, despite their defeat at the Battle of Culloden, with many remaining armed and engaged long after Bonnie Prince Charlie went on the run on April 16, 1746.

Around 1000 Jacobites ­gathered the following day at Ruthven ­Barracks, where a written order from Prince Charles Edward Stuart told them to “seek their own safety” and disband,

But, for many, surrendering was too dangerous an option, according to Professor Murray ­Pittock, ­historian and pro-vice principal of Glasgow University.

As time went on, the risks of Jacobites handing themselves in became clear.

Prof Pittock said: “The mood of the Ruthven meetings was downcast. Many fought on to avoid capture or because the risk of surrendering was high.

“To see how the British Army is dealing with people, there is not really a lot of incentive to go home. They think they will be at more risk.

“In June, a number of Jacobites went into Fort William after the British government ­promised six weeks’ immunity. Captain Scott drowned them in a salmon net.”

Jacobites engaged in low-level disruption, raiding and ­protection of vulnerable tenantry as well as recruitment to the Irish Brigade and probably Scottish regiments in French service, including Ecossais Royales.

Assassinations of unpopular ­government officers or sympathizers were also recorded. The British government still considered the Jacobite threat to be “major” at this time with around 12,000 to 13,000 soldiers deployed across the entire country – from Berwick and Stranraer to Elgin, Forres, Stonehaven, Inverbervie and Montrose – by the end of August 1746.

As government forces mobilized, significant units of armed Jacobites continued to appear in the field, said Prof Pittock, who is due to publish a book on the British Army between 1746 and 1760.

At the end of April, 120 armed MacGregor men were recorded in Balqhuidder after marching home ‘colours flying and pipes playing’ with the Army unwilling to tackle or pursue Jacobite units that maintained discipline, Prof Pittock said.

One battalion of Lochiel’s ­regiment was still operational in May – as were 500 men under ­Clanranald. Orkney remained under Jacobite control until late that month and, despite British attacks, four local Jacobite lairds remained successfully hidden.

Clans made concerted attempts to resist Cumberland and his men with around a dozen chiefs meeting at Mortlaig in early May.

“At the meeting… they entered into a bond for their mutual defence and agreed never to lay down their arms, or make a general peace without the consent of the whole,” according to an 1832 account by James Browne.

“By the bond of association, the chiefs agreed…to raise on behalf of the prince and in defense of their country, as many able-bodied armed men as they could on their respective properties.”

Around 600 men gathered later that month across the north and west but the clans “ultimately did not have the time or morale to raise or retain enough men in the field,” Prof Pittock said.

Although a unified response failed to materialize, Jacobites remained active across Scotland. Jacobite expresses – the non-stop delivery of letters by horse – continued until August. A British regiment was deployed across Banffshire in the summer of 1746 with insurgents reported in Argyll that September.

Arms were surrendered in the Mearns right into the summer of 1748.

“British atrocities may have been carried out against innocent ­victims, but there were plenty of continuing Jacobite threats,” Prof Pittock said.

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

Over the sea to Skye

Mo Ghile Mear – Irish myth and melody

https://howlinginfinite.com/2017/07/20/mo-ghile-mear-in-irish-myth-and-melody/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeiyKITdivA

McGoohan’s Blues – sunbathing in the rain

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

All along the ancient wastes the thin reflections spin
That gather all the times and tides at once we love within
That build the edges round the shrouds that cloud the setting sun
And carry us to other days and other days to one
Roy Harper, The Same Old Rock, Stormcock

It must’ve been May 1969. A cold, wet and windy day in Hull, Yorkshire. I’d hitch-hiked from Reading in Berkshire to London and then northwards on the A1 to visit an old school chum in the Humberside port city. And it is there, in a student share house that I first dropped Mescaline, a derivative of peyote, an hallucinogenic psychotropic favoured by Mexican shamans of yore. In our circles, it was prized for its visual and aural delights rather than the more ”head trip”, mood-manipulating and psychologically unpredictable and potentially unsettling lysergic acid. And that evening, headphones on, I first listened to McGoohan’s Blues.

This eighteen minute digression from the concept if not the plot of an iconic if indecipherable ‘sixties’ television series (that’s the featured picture), was the penultimate track on Folkjokeopus, the third album of English folk singer, songwriter and acoustic guitarist extraordinaire Roy Harper. The song was indeed the whole point of Folkjokeopus – its raison d’être- the rest of the album was  predominantly light-weight, comedic psychedelia – with the exception of the bleak and bitter but nevertheless captivating “love gone wrong” song She’s The One.

Wikipedia and generic music sites tell us that Folkjokeopus was released in June 1969, but more hip sources reckon it was released on May Day – and my memory concurs with that because Spring sprung as I was hitching homeward, and I revelled in the record all summer long.

Though I’d been going to folk clubs for several years, I’d not heard much of Roy Harper apart from a throwaway hippie-vaudeville track from his second album on The Rock Machine Turns You On, one of the many popular ”sampler” albums of that. The best was CBS’ double album gatefold Fill Your Head With Rock (loosely defined – it included Leonard Cohen and Laura Nyro).

Sunbathing in the rain …

And how does it feel with your god strapped to your wrist?
And him leading you such a chase …
Roy Harper, How Does It Feel, Flat Baroque and Berserk 

So, there was I, on Humberside in a space “somewhere between Heaven and Woolworths”, to borrow from contemporary Mersey poet Brian Patten, who I was into at the time, listening to a sprawling and bawling, angry, eighteen minute solo acoustic guitar-driven folkie rant against capitalism, consumerism, hedonism, religion, conformity, ignorance, deceit, hypocrisy, the system, the establishment, the plutocracy, the banks, the media, the baubles and bibles, modern life … everything really. You can’t fight the manipulated, oppressive, powerless, pointless and utter futility of it all – as the song unfolds, you start out questioning but you end up obeying.

The singer had indeed become the eponymous Prisoner, yearning for liberty but trapped in a deceptively bucolic and scenic and yet sinister “village” that is in reality an open-air jail – kind of nightmare Butlins Holiday Camp (beloved yet satirised by a generation of Britons) with all attempts at escape foiled. It was in fact filmed in Portmeirion in North Wales, a town that has developed a robust tourist industry on the back of the cult classic.

Patrick McGoohan and Virginia Maskell in  The Prisoner

Roy Harper was twenty eight years of age and already a jaded veteran of the folk-circuit and ad bitter divorcee with heavy personal baggage, a wee son he dotes on and chips on both shoulders (well-balanced, I suppose) raging against the machine. His is a seemingly nihilistic anomie with no direction home, denouncing “the deceit of my friends the betrayals of which I am part …” He sees himself as an outsider, “the festive consumer who end up consumed by the feast, but nevertheless questioning “the rules and the codes and the system that keeps them in chains, which is where they belong with no poems, no love and no brains”.

This is reflected in many of his songs from that era, most particularly those featured on his fifth and to many, his best album, Stormcock, released in May 1971; and this led me then and always to regard him a kind of high priest of Anglo angst.

He had a few more years on the clock than me. I was twenty. A naïf, ingenue, whatever, at the end of the beginning of my journey. I was optimistic, adventurous, devil-may-care, inexperienced with people and their variegated behaviours, untainted by pride and prejudice, and in retrospect unfamiliar with the bitterness and vitriol that he injected into his song. But I guess I “got it”, understood what he was saying to me through those headphones in the sanctum of my “trip” – yeah, that’s where I was at that point in time, for the want of a better description. Though I was aware of what he was preaching, I’d had precious little direct experience – those lessons were down the road apiece, and not that far away either. But that’s another tale … long story short, I was radical when I first heard the song. I remain so half a century hence. And. I still “get it”!

The title of this article, by the way, is taken from an entertaining an informative book by Welsh author Gwyneth Lewis: Sunbathing in the Rain – a cheerful book about depression. This is not to suggest that Roy Harper is actually a depressive – but he’s certainly a master of writing excruciatingly sad, depressing and borderline nihilistic songs and delivering them with an angry, emotional intensity. Having seen him perform live many many times over the following five years, I recall that many times he would deliver rambling and even disjointed introductions and extended soliloquies that taxed his audience’s patience and forbearance. I once walked out at the interval during a gig at the Royal Albert Hall even though he was accompanied by guitar icon and Led Zeppelin alumni Jimmy Page. The songs did indeed mirror the man.

Roy in his seventies, still rockin’ in the free world

But, back to Hull and my headphones …

Having ridden the rollercoaster through the seemingly stream of consciousness rant for some ten minutes, Roy imperceptibly segues into a lyrical, calmer (though still edgy) and quieter mood, a dreamy, trippy vision of hope and resilience, suggesting that despite all the difficulties and diversions, the compromises and cop outs that went with being being enveloped, embedded, trapped even, in the system, there is still hope for a better future. And climaxes in a folk-rock coda cum apotheosis.

The band kicked in – and so did the mescaline. Listening today, the band’s entry entrance feels contrived and ponderous, but in my minds eye, I can still recall the multicoloured images that flashed across bay closed eyelids. Disneyesque “Fantasia” forms of many ebbed and flowed, shape-shifted and morphed with the music and the lyrics. Rivers and rainbows, fairies and fires, sunrise and sunset, galaxies and stars.

Under the toadstool lover down by the dream
Everything flowing over rainbows downstream
Silver the turning water flying away
I’ll come to see you sooner I’m on my way
And there’s a mirror that I’m looking straight through
And I get it
And there’s a doorway that I’m ducking into
To forget it
But flashing just beyond the sky
The shattering midnight gathers
And reminding me behind my mind
The earth quakes, the sun flakes flutter

Over the mountain fairground
Candy flies stay
Under the moonshine fountain
I’m on my way
Lemon tree blossom ladies
Poured my tea
After the blue sky breezes following me
There’s a river that I’m making it with
And I know it
And I’m floating to I don’t care where
I just go it
But flashing just beyond the sky
The shattering midnight gathers
And reminding me behind my mind
The earth quakes, the sun flakes flutter

Daffodil April petal hiding the game
Forests of restless chessmen life is the same
Tides in the sand sun lover watching us dream
Covered in stars and clover rainbows downstream
And the question in the great big underneath is forever
And the fanfare that I’m forcing through my teeth answers “Never”
But flashing just beyond the sky
The shattering midnight gathers
And reminding me behind my mind
The earth quakes, the sun flakes flutter …

But it was not Roy’s way to end on a brighter note. As with all trips, there is often a comedown:

The pumpkin coach and the rags approach
And the wind is devouring the ashes

Words and images such as those McGoohan’s apotheosis were commonplace back in those days, when Marc Bolan could warble “My people were fair, and had sky in their hair, but now they’re content to wear crowns stars on their brows“. We thoroughly understood that and empathized. And we marveled at the Scottish bard who could pen ‘The Minotaur’s Song‘ and ‘Job’s Tears‘, and then run off with Old Father Hubbard. But then didn’t we all in the days when Tolkien was king, and elves and ents walked amongst us. So when Roy went gambolling through toadstools and daffodils, fairgrounds and fountains, that was just the way it was back then in that Middle Earth between Shangri La and the real world that we’d have to re-enter sooner or later – which I did adventurously two years later.

… down through the years

I dropped mescaline and acid many times over the next few months but though I longed to repeat it, never again did I recreate that very first journey. By year’s end, I’d done with both, and by the end of the eighties, was done with dope. But I remember it still over half a century down the road and I still get flashbacks and glimpses of those fantastical images … How does the great song by that Irish band go?

Unicorns and cannonballs, palaces and piers
Trumpets, towers, and tenements, wide oceans full of tears
Flags, rags, ferry boats, scimitars and scarves
Every precious dream and vision underneath the stars
Yes, you climbed on the ladder with the wind in your sails
You came like a comet blazing your trail
Too high, too far, too soon
You saw the whole of the moon …

And what happened next? I graduated, travelled, moved on, and following Roy’s lead, wrote lengthy, opaque songs well over ten minutes long with sonic, narrative and lyrical transitions just like he had done on Folkjokeopus and Stormcock. These include London John and Christopher Columbus in the seventies, and in latter days In That Howling Infinite which gave its name to this blog, an allegorical saga of a Mad Sea Captain and a White Whale , the dystopian E Lucivan le Stelle, and the irreverent O Jerusalem. Roy Harper is eighty one, with some thirty albums under belt. He was still touring in 2019, but is now officially ‘retired’, and living in a secluded corner of Ireland,

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

The complete lyrics of McGoohan’s Blues follow the song below.

Postscript

I’ve harked back to Roy Harper in several posts in In That Howling Infinite. There’s When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease, a eulogy to one of my oldest friends, an avid cricketer who passed last year; and Back in the Day, a chronicle of roots and fruits.  And for more stories like these in In That Howling Infinite, see Tall Tales, Small Stories, Eulogies and Epiphanies

McGoohan’s Blues

Nicky my child he stands there with the wind in his hair
Wondering whether the water the wind of the where
I fear that someday he might ask me if mine is the blame
And I’ve got no reply save to tell him it’s all just a game
And Heather and I lay together and I was in love
She weighted up the gains and the losses and gave me the shove
The fear of mankind’s untogetherness pounds in my heart
The deceit of my friends the betrayals of which I am part
And O how the sea she roars with laughter
And howls with the dancing wind
To see my two feet standing here questioning

And I’m just a social experiment tailored to size
I’ve tried out the national machine and the welfare surprise
I’m the rich man the poor man the peace man the war man the beast
The festive consumer who ends up consumed in the feast
And my fife eyed promoter is clutching two birds in the bush
He’s a thief he’s as bad as the joker they’re both in the rush
He’s telling me Ghandi was handy and Jesus sold his ring
(Dunno who to, God maybe)
“And everyone knows dat dis dough’s gonna make me de king”

And O how the sea she roars with laughter
And howls with the dancing wind
To see my two feet standing here questioning

Meanwhile the ticket collectors are punching their holes
Into your memories your journeys and into your souls
Your life sentence starts and the judge hands you down a spare wig
Saying: “Get out of that and goodbye old boy have a good gig”
And the town label makers stare down with their gallery eyes
And point with computer stained fingers each time you arise
To the rules and the codes and the system that keeps them in chains
Which is where they belong with no poems no love and no brains

And O how the sea she roars with laughter
And howls with the dancing wind
To see my two feet standing there questioning

Meanwhile the TV commercials are sweeping the day
Brainwashing innocent kids into thinking their way
The wet politicians and clergymen have much to say
Defending desires of the sheep they are leading astray
And Ma’s favourite pop star is forcing a grin he’s a smash
Obliging the soft-headed viewers to act just as flash
The village TV hooks its victims on give away cash
The addicts are numbers who serve to perpetuate trash

And O how the sea she roars with laughter
And howls with the dancing wind
To see my stupid poetry shuffleing

And the bankers and tycoons and hoarders of money and art
Full up with baubles and bibles and full of no heart
Who travel first class on a pleasure excursion to fame
Are the eyes that are guiding society’s ludicrous aim
And the village is making its Sunday collection in church
The church wobbles ‘twixt hell and heaven’s crumbling perch
Unnoticed the money box loudly endorses the shame
As the world that Christ fought is supported by using his name

And O how the sea she roars with laughter
And howls with the dancing wind
To see my stupid poetry burbling

And the pin-striped sardine-cum-magician is packed in his train
Censoring all of the censorship filling his brain
He glares through his armour-plate vision and says “Hmm, insane”
The prisoner is taking his shoes off to walk in the rain
And the luminous green prima donna is sniffing the sky
She daren’t tread the earth that she’s smelling her birth was too high
Her bank balance castle is built on opinion and fear
Which is all she allows within three hundred miles of her ear

And O how the sea she roars with laughter
And howls with the dancing wind
To see my stupid poetry burbling

And I’ve seen all your pedestal values your good and your bad
If you really believe them your passing is going to be hard
And I’ve thought through our thought and I know that its blind silly season
Occurs when our reasoning is trying to fathom a reason
And if you really know it’s all a joke but you’re just putting me on
Well it’s sure a good act that you’ve got ‘cos you never let on
But if all of that supersale overkill world is for real
Well there’s nowhere to go kid so you might as well start to freewheel

And O how the sea she roars with laughter
And howls with the dancing wind
To see my two feet standing there burbling

And I had this dream in here same time as standing awake
These various visions rushed through as I giggled and quaked
The distant guns thunder my end and I duck for a while
Auntie Lily is handing me candy she chuckles I smile
And our village is where I was born and it’s where I will die
And I’ll never be able to leave it whatever I try
The ebb and the flow of the forces of life pass me by
Which is all that I’ll know from my birth to my last gasping sigh

And O how the sea she roars with laughter
And howls with the dancing wind
To see the dying lying there obeying

My age and my time
The blood fire wine and rhyme
That fills my dream reminds me of an atom in a bubble on a wave
That held its breath for one sweet second then was popped and disappeared
Into fruitful futilities meaningless meaning
Meaningless meaning

Under the toadstool lover down by the dream
Everything flowing over rainbows downstream
Silver the turning water flying away
I’ll come to see you sooner I’m on my way
And there’s a mirror that I’m looking straight through
And I get it
And there’s a doorway that I’m ducking into
To forget it
But flashing just beyond the sky the shattering midnight gathers
And reminding me behind my mind the earth quakes the sun flakes flutter

Over the mountain fairground
Candy flies stay
Under the moonshine fountain
I’m on my way
Lemon tree blossom ladies
Poured my tea
After the blue sky breezes following me
There’s a river that I’m making it with
And I know it
And I’m floating to I don’t care where
I just go it
But flashing just beyond the sky the shattering midnight gathers
And reminding me behind my mind the earth quakes the sun flakes flutter

Daffodil April petal hiding the game
Forests of restless chessmen life is the same
Tides in the sand sun lover watching us dream
Covered in stars and clover rainbows downstream
And the question in the great big underneath is forever
And the fanfare that I’m forcing through my teeth answers “Never”
But the flashing just beyond the sky the shattering midnight gathers
And reminding me behind my mind the earth quakes the sun flakes flutter

The pumpkin coach and the rags approach and the wind is devouring the ashes

The great outdoors – camping days

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond’rous glory of the everlasting stars.
Clancy of the Overflow, AB (Banjo) Paterson

Sleeping under the stars, close to nature and exposed to the elements has a timeless allure, whether under canvas or on a bedroll or in a swag. It’s almost atavistic – a harking back to simpler and indeed, primeval days, a retreat albeit temporary from the workaday world and the ties that bind us to it, and a genuine pleasure of the open road.

For those with a drop of vagabond blood in their veins, and the echoes of a gypsy soul, it’s a sure cure for those “summertime blues”!

The Travelling People

Countries where the nomadic life has long been consigned to history and where the sedentary lifestyle is regarded as the civilised norm, individuals and authorities have long struggled to decide what camping is, and who is allowed to do it. Over the decades, the act of sleeping outside has served wildly varying ends: as a return to agrarian ideals, a rite of passage, a route to self-improvement. But whilst some camp for leisure and pleasure, for many, it is a economic and social necessity that has often been condemned as uncivilised, unsanitary, indigent, and even criminal – and it has also served as a proxy for disputes about race, class, discrimination and rootlessness.

For centuries, sleeping outside has been embraced or condemned, depending on who’s doing it. A recent book on the history of camping in the US explores what, exactly, camping is, and how the pursuit intersects with protest culture, homelessness, and identity. A excellent review in The New Yorker is republished below.

In some countries that are seeking to modernise rapidly, heavy-handed authorities have endeavoured to curtail the wandering life by regulation and resettlement, at times, by brute force. Recall the sad conclusion to James A Michener’s novel Caravans, set in Afghanistan, and the its movie adaptation, and also British historian Vincent Cronin’s The Last Migration (1957), a  account of the Pahlavi shah’s regime’s repression of the Falqani nomads in the name of “progress”. I can’t recommend it enough. It is tragic and beautiful, and authentic in every finely drawn detail, like a Persian miniature on ivory. Closer to our western consciousness and consciences, is the savage repression and dispossession of the Native American and Australian First Nations. It is historically and culturally ironic that a loop-hole in Australian law decreed that camping was permitted on the lawns of Old Parliament House in Canberra, the Australian capital provided no more than twenty tents were erected. So it was that on Australia Day, 26th January 1972, indigenous activists established an Aboriginal Tent Embassy to protest against the the Australian government’s refusal to recognize indigenous land rights. It is there to this day, drawing national attention to unresolved indigenous issues. Read about the Aboriginal Tent Embassy HERE 

The early light is breaking
The morning sun is waiting in the sky
And I think I’m gonna break away
And follow where the birds of freedom fly
Caravans, Mike Batt

Aboriginal Tent Embassy 26th January 1972

The big backyard

As a nipper in Birmingham back in the late fifties, we had a very large backyard, with a lawn, apple and pear trees and a huge veggie garden. And one of our pleasures during the few warm months of school summer holidays was to erect a tent on that lawn. My brothers and I would spend our days outdoors, with a picnic and an old wind-up phonogram record player, until ordered in at sundown. We’d always wanted to spend the night there but our folks wouldn’t let us. We never understand why – we were perfectly safe in our own garden, and in our suburban backyard, there were none of the wild things we encounter in the wild. Looking back, I surmised that it had a lot to do with social norms. The folks grew up in rural Ireland, and probably associated camping out with the peregrinating ‘travellers’ who were regarded very much as unsightly and shady – a prejudice that persevered into their new lives in Birmingham. Back then, we had other names for them, for which I’ve been called to order on many a Facebook post.

In those days, “the travellers” would camp with their caravans and lorries on the “waste land” (yes, that what we called it, for reasons that were never explained – there was a lot that was not explained back the but was just taken for granted) that used to be homes and factories before the Luftwaffe destroyed them over ten years before. They had Irish accents, and this created an affinity with these itinerant folk as our parents and relatives were Irish immigrants, and we lived in an Irish world of Irish history, politics and music – as a young teen, I loved Ewan MacColl’s beautiful song Freeborn Man of the Travelling People, and it was the very first folk song I ever sang in public – in a billet in Southall during an Easter CND march.

As teens, we joined the Boy Scouts – where camping was deemed not only acceptable when under the auspices of the institution, but also, character building, and a means to learning resilience, self-reliance, and of acquiring valuable Baden-Powell bushcraft skills. To my folks, this gave camping the tick of respectability.

I must’ve been eleven or twelve when I first went off to camp, the whole troop   on the back of an open lorry with all our gear and supplies. That was was my first night away from home, in the middle of nowhere, and it was, well, unsettling. Two blankets pinned together, rucksack for a pillow, rubber groundsheet on the cold hard ground. Washing in the freezing country river. Drop latrines that we had first to dig . Tea “brewed” in a huge dixie, fry-ups in a big frying pan, and “spud bashing”. “Bush” walks and “survival” tips, and the famous “wide game”. Cocoa around a roaring camp of a summer evening fire at night singing jolly scouting songs.

The annual summer camp became a permanent fixture of my early adolescence, and off I went every year until I left senior scouts and grew out of “god, queen and country”. But it was an important and enjoyable experience. I still remember those songs, and snatches often pop into my memory unannounced.

We’d see parts of our land that few of us had the means to travel to, and experience a rural England that city folk had long lost touch with. On overnight hikes we’d tote our backpacks along country lanes and byways, compass and ordinance survey map in hand, and set up a flimsy tent in an open field when the sun went down. The following hazy pictures were taken at a combined South Birmingham troop scout camp in Echternach, Luxembourg, on the German border. We were an eclectic crew – it even included a trio of Sea Scouts (incongruous as Birmingham was a long way from the sea). Of its time – nowadays, such a group shot would be so much more cosmopolitan. That’s me, arms folded.

Echternach Scout Camp, August 1963

Echternach Scout Camp, August 1963

As I grew to manhood – and outgrew scouting, I remained accustomed to sleeping out. At music festivals in rural England in the late sixties, it was a given that we would bed down on site come all weather – as the lovely pictures of the retro-medieval fayres provided by my good friend Charles Tyler show (Charles in the lad with the guitar in the featured photograph). I would often sleep on the side of the road when hitchhiking throughout the land. I’ve slept under the stars in England and Scotland, in Greece and Yugoslavia, Syria and Jordan, Iran and Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

I’ve awoken covered in snow near the Culloden battlefield outside Inverness; been moved on by Yugoslav police when I’d mistakenly turned in for the night next to a military base outside Niš; settled down in a shabby park by the Sea of Galilee, wary of scorpions; slept on a precarious ledge high above the rose city of Petra in Jordan; bedded down in the desert on the border between Iran and Afghanistan; and battled mosquitoes on the banks of the Hawkesbury River. In latter years, on safari in Tanzania, we awoke in the night in our tent by the Rufiji river to see a big eye staring at us through the flimsy window as an old tusker proceeded to do his business right beside our tent; and sat around a fire of acacia sticks in a makeshift bush camp on the Serengeti savanna.

Just the other day, I was browsing through my travel diary for 26th August 1971 and came upon the description of my nighttime arrival in the outskirts of Amman, Jordan, on my way to Petra and Aqaba – a night I had long forgotten: “In my lostness, I came upon a policeman. And soon, three traffic cops were crashing the ash and buying me tea and bread. At last, they took me to a park, where King Hussein had a palace,  and bade me sleep – under their protection. Come morning, I was gently awoken by the coppers who bought me breakfast and commandeered a taxi to take me into the town centre (where) again, police assisted me by asking a taxi driver to take me to the Aqaba road”. We took risks, we travellers of “the Overland” back in the day, and many times we were blessed with the charity and caring of our fellow humans.

My hitching days are now long gone, and so is the urge to set up camp in the great outdoors – apart from that African journey, when there was little alternative. And yet, I still love the great outdoors and being close to nature. Living off-grid on a rural property far from the madding crowd and surrounded by forest, with birdsong by day and frog song by night, I reckon I have have the best of both worlds.

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

Read also in In That Howling Infinite, Song of the Road (1) – my hitchhiking days, and Song of the Road (2) – The Accidental Traveller

Barsham Faire 1973

Meagan Fair, Pembrokeshire, 1975

The Confounding Politics of Camping in America

For centuries, sleeping outside has been embraced or condemned, depending on who’s doing it. A recent book by the historian Phoebe S. K. Young explores what, exactly, camping is, and how the pursuit intersects with protest culture, homelessness, and identity.

Dan Piepenbring,  The New Yorker April 27, 2022

An illustrated scene of many people camping

Illustration by Sally Deng 

Just a drop would do, though. Early campers didn’t wish to be mistaken for actual vagabonds, and the line between the two was easily smudged. In 1884, Samuel June Barrows, an outdoors enthusiast and, later, a one-term congressman, warned that a traveller carrying a “motley array of bedding, boxes, bags, and bundles” might arouse “suspicions of vagrancy”; to distinguish oneself from the riffraff, it was best to pack a “de luxe” tent and fashionable attire. Barrows’s anxiety underscored the contradictions of recreational camping, which he described as “a luxurious state of privation.” One of its luxuries was that it was temporary. In the name of leisure, well-heeled campers sought out the same conditions that, in other contexts, they condemned as uncivilized, unsanitary, or criminal.

In “Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement” (Oxford University Press), the historian Phoebe S. K. Young finds that Americans have long struggled to decide what camping is, and who is allowed to do it. Over the decades, the act of sleeping outside has served wildly varying ends: as a return to agrarian ideals, a means of survival, a rite of passage for the nuclear family, a route to self-improvement, and a form of First Amendment expression. In Young’s account, it becomes a proxy for disputes about race, class, and rootlessness—all the schisms in the American experiment.

As Barrows slept beneath the stars, countless workers were forced to do the same. In the eighteen-seventies, a boom-and-bust economy and a burgeoning network of railroads compelled laborers to crisscross the nation, following the cycles of the market. The “tramp problem” vexed those of means. Allan Pinkerton, the founder of the ruthless, union-busting Pinkerton National Detective Agency, blamed the Civil War for giving men a taste of “the lazy habits of camp-life.” In 1878’s “Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives,” Pinkerton detailed the “grotesque company” tramps kept by moonlight, writing that debauchees would doze “in a stupid sodden way that told of brutish instincts and experiences.” Scarier than the encampments was the fear that some Americans might find them appealing, retreating from society to enjoy “the genuine pleasure of the road.”

The travel industry soon recognized those pleasures by making tramping an aesthetic, something that campers could slip into and shuck off as they pleased. A writer for Outing, a magazine aimed at moneyed outdoorsmen, preferred to “rough it in the most approved ‘tramp’ style—to abjure boiled shirts and feather beds and dainty food, and even good grammar.” As Young points out, the quotation marks around “tramp” raised a barricade between the imitation and the original. Real tramps led a precarious existence, subject to arrest, surveillance, poverty, and ostracism. When élite campers wore their costume, they shrugged at a world in which, as Pinkerton wrote, “a man may be eminent to-day and tomorrow a tramp.”

The double standard was especially glaring in Native communities. White Americans, including Barrows, saw tribal settlements as the epitome of savagery. The U.S. Office of Indian Affairs hoped that Native populations would disavow their “barbarous life” and take up “a distaste for the camp-fire.” Such goals were presented as matters of public health, but the message diverged sharply depending on the audience. Although Native groups “learned that the only way to prevent consumption was to give up camp life,” Young writes, “recreational campers read that exposure to fresh air and sunlight” could cure the illness. The government forced Native children to attend boarding school and subjected adults to dehumanizing reëducation projects. Meanwhile, Outing, as it had with tramps, presented Indianness as an identity to be adopted and discarded on a camper’s whim. One contributor confessed that summer gave him “an irresistible desire” to “live the life of a savage in all of its most primitive simplicity.”

In the early twentieth century, the automobile allowed legions of new drivers to flock to the countryside. Camping shed some of its élitist pretensions, but its popularity exposed new rifts. Eager for traffic, many towns constructed no-frills auto camps at their outskirts, where entry was often free, at least until the camps attracted hordes of families and their Model Ts. These “tin-can” tourists, as Sunset magazine called them, ate canned food heated on the engine—or, more boldly, by a camp stove connected to the exhaust pipe. Camps couldn’t keep such people away; now that the backcountry, or even the frontcountry, was within reach, Americans intended to pitch their tents wherever they could. From 1910 to 1920, national parks and monuments saw a fivefold increase in visitors, reaching a million a year; by 1930, that figure had jumped to more than three million. The deluge was unmanageable. In addition to arresting vistas and pristine forests, campers expected generous amenities—firewood, electric lights, running water, garbage collection—and they were not in the habit of leaving nature as they found it. California’s redwoods, in particular, were so frequently, heedlessly beheld that their roots began to choke underfoot.

To save the trees, Emilio Meinecke, a plant pathologist for the U.S. Forest Service, conceived a template still in use today: a one-way loop road with short “garage-spurs,” each of which functioned as parking for a designated campsite. By presenting campers with private, manicured spaces, Meinecke hoped to spare the surrounding plant life, reminding visitors that they were “guests of the nation.” Intentionally or not, his campsites had the flavor of the suburbs—the land, once for farming, was now to be savored as a consumer, and every family had its plot. The New Deal funded the “Meineckizing” of almost ninety thousand acres of federal campgrounds, about half of which were new, signalling the rise of what Young calls “the campers’ republic.” “Mixing leisure with nature,” she writes, “became a potent way for citizens to demonstrate national belonging.”

But all was not well in the republic. The Great Depression had pushed record numbers of Americans into homelessness: by one estimate, during one day in the spring of 1933, a million and a half people were sleeping outside or in public shelters, and the actual number was likely higher. Because camping was so popular, budget-minded vacationers were sometimes cheek by jowl with the down-and-out. Who could say which was which? Manufacturers of camping trailers went out of their way to disclaim the use of their products as “a permanent address.” Others argued that campgrounds were too affordable or unsupervised. In 1940, J. Edgar Hoover, never one for understatement, alleged that roadside tourist camps had become “dens of vice and corruption” for “gangs of desperados.” Even Meinecke, for all his talk of hospitality, did not look kindly on extended stays at national parks. In an internal report, he complained that some visitors, “evidently camped for a long time,” had given one of his campsites a “ ‘used,’ second-hand look,” spoiling it for “decent people who are not slum-minded.”

If the U.S. has dithered about the basics of camping—who can do it, where, and for how long—it’s been outright bewildered by camping as political speech. Could anyone have a message so urgent that it can be delivered only by sleeping outdoors? The answer is yes, as thousands of protesters have made clear, but the government has seldom taken them at their word, instead casting them as devious freeloaders or closet indigents. Occupy Wall Street, which famously enjoined its participants to bring tents, honed an approach popularized after the Civil War, when the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans’ group, camped near the Washington Monument to raise awareness of their sacrifices. In 1932, the Bonus Army—thousands of out-of-work veterans seeking their service bonuses—followed suit, encamping in plain view of the Capitol. For weeks, the public debated whether the soldiers were heroes or hobos. President Herbert Hoover, deciding on the latter, ordered the clearing of the camps, resulting in a fiery conflict that claimed at least one life.

But a tent makes a forceful statement: someone is here, and that someone intends to stay. When Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference wanted to show Washington the true toll of poverty, they decided that camping was the only suitable action. The Poor People’s Campaign brought more than two thousand people to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in May, 1968, a month after King’s assassination. Known as Resurrection City, the encampment lasted for six weeks, drawing support and ire. A concerned citizen wrote to President Lyndon B. Johnson that “a hoard [sic] of locusts” was abusing “hallowed ground.” Calvin Trillin, writing for this magazine, noted the irony: the poor had intended to show America that they were “sick, dirty, disorganized, and powerless—and they are criticized daily for being sick, dirty, disorganized, and powerless.” By June 24th, the camp had dwindled to five hundred, and police fired tear gas to expel those remaining. A demonstration about homelessness, it seemed, was no different than homelessness itself.

Just three years later, Vietnam Veterans Against the War began planning to camp near the Capitol, and the Nixon Administration, fearing a repeat of Resurrection City, refused to give them a permit. The V.V.A.W. requested a stay on the ban, and the case went to court. Determining the legality of protest encampments, Young writes, “required finding an elusive balance between Constitutional freedoms and public safety.” The N.P.S. would allow only a “simulated” camp on federal grounds: no fires, no tents. John Kerry, who argued for the V.V.A.W., maintained that a real campsite was the only way to “tell our story to the people of this country.” The judge hearing the case, meanwhile, felt that to camp was essentially to sleep and was an act that couldn’t “express a single idea”—and that couldn’t claim First Amendment protection. He upheld the camping ban; the Court of Appeals reversed it; the Supreme Court reinstated it. The V.V.A.W. decided to camp anyway, and, not wanting a public-relations disaster, Nixon let them be. The Washington Post quoted a Park Police officer who, looking over a National Mall clotted with sleeping bags, waxed philosophical: “What’s the definition of camping? You tell me. I don’t know.”

The ensuing decades did little to answer that question. By 2012, Congress was holding hearings on the subject, in which Trey Gowdy, a House member from South Carolina, grilled Jonathan Jarvis, the director of the N.P.S at the time. “What is the definition of camping?” Gowdy demanded. Occupy D.C. had been staying in McPherson Square, in downtown Washington, for months, and Jarvis had been reluctant to say that the protesters were camping—their actions were a means to an end, not the end itself, which was reason enough to avoid enforcing the N.P.S. ban. Gowdy seemed to understand the Occupiers as recreational campers in disguise; their politics were a cover story for a good time, and taxpayers were footing the bill. But the Occupiers emphasized that they weren’t camping at all. (“WE ARE NOT CAMPING,” signs on their tents read.) Campers slept outside for the joy of it; Occupiers wanted “a redress of grievances.” Gowdy couldn’t compute how people camping “for fun” were permitted only in certain areas, while those “pitching a camp in protest of fun” were welcomed by the National Park Service. Without a clear distinction between camping and not-camping—the distinction that generations of Americans had tried and failed to make—he felt that “the fabric of this republic” was “going to unravel.”

Lost in the rain with no direction home – Dylan’s poem for Woody

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.

The words of America’s national bard came to me as I read for the first time this very morning Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, written by Bob Dylan in honour of his idol Woody Guthrie, who at the time was dying from Huntington’s disease.

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, wrote Walt Whitman, setting song lines for a young nation, and what was seen at the time as its promise and its bold, independent identity. He reflected his country’s growing up and coming of age to his own personal awakening and awareness, in his seeing and being enlightened. Dylan was to become the young voice of an older but not wiser nation that seemed very much like it was not busy being born, but, rather, under the weight of its myriad contradictions – of the old and the new, the youth and their elders, of war and peace,  black and white. Dylan heard the his country’s song in the turbulent, transformed and transforming sixties declaiming that he’d know my song well before I start singing.

In 1855, when Whitman published his first incarnation of Leaves of Grass, no one had yet heard anything like the raw, declamatory, and jubilant voice of this self- proclaimed “American”.  And the same could be said of the young Bob Dylan when he broke out from the pack that had gathered in the folk cafés and clubs of New York City in the early years of the nineteen sixties, an enigmatic poetic figure whose songs spotlighted the chaos and division that have long defined what it meant to be an American. It is no wonder that in later years,  Dylan would acknowledge his debt to Whitman in I Contain Multitudes – unoriginal and some would argue, pretentious, but then Bob has always borrowed, be it from the Anthology of American Folk Music, the British folk tradition, the avant guard poets of Europe, and the great books of the western literary canon.

Dylan read his poem for Woody aloud once only, reciting it at New York City’s Town Hall on April 12th 1963.

Introducing the poem, he told the audience he’d been asked to “write something about Woody … what does Woody Guthrie mean to you in twenty-five words,” for an upcoming book on the icon left wing singer-songwriter. He explained that he “couldn’t do it – I wrote out five pages, and, I have it here, have it here by accident, actually.” What followed was not a simple eulogy, but a lengthy, 1705 word stream of consciousness treatise on the importance of hope.

Dylan sets the scene by describing the stresses and strains of everyday life and challenging choices we have to make as we navigate it. He describes how these can cause us to feel alone, lost, and without direction. He then explains the need for hope and how we need something to give our lives meaning. He concludes by suggesting that, for him, Woody Guthrie is as much a source of hope and beauty in the world as God or religion.

Reading it for the first time ever this morning, I could hear words, lines and themes from songs that were yet to be written, songs that have followed me down these past sixty years, from those early albums of anger and introspection, protest and perception, through to My Rough And Rowdy Ways.

The recitation was recorded, but was not officially released until 1991, on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991, after circulating on bootleg releases for years. The poem is published in full below. The images in the video that follows it are clichéd and distracting; just shut your eyes and listen to the words. I prefer just reading and recalling all those uncounted ballads, songs and snatches and the improbable ‘echoes’ of things to come. I have added a gallery of favourite pictures of the man himself. Enjoy.

More on Bob Dylan in In That Howling Infinite: What’s Bob got to do with it?; Legends, bibles, plagues – Bob Dylan’s Nobel Lecture; Blind Willie McTell – Bob Dylan’s Americana; Cross the Green Mountain – Bob Dylan’s Americana; Still tangled up in Bob

In That Howling Infinite, read also, I hear America singing – happy birthday, Walt Whitman; The last rains came gently – Steinbeck’s dustbowl ballad, and The Sport of Kings – CE Morgan’s “great American novel”

Bob and Woody

Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie

When yer head gets twisted and yer mind grows numb
When you think you’re too old, too young, too smart or too dumb
When yer laggin’ behind an’ losin’ yer pace
In a slow-motion crawl of life’s busy race
No matter what yer doing if you start givin’ up
If the wine don’t come to the top of yer cup
If the wind’s got you sideways with with one hand holdin’ on
And the other starts slipping and the feeling is gone
And yer train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it
And the wood’s easy findin’ but yer lazy to fetch it
And yer sidewalk starts curlin’ and the street gets too long
And you start walkin’ backwards though you know its wrong
And lonesome comes up as down goes the day
And tomorrow’s mornin’ seems so far away
And you feel the reins from yer pony are slippin’
And yer rope is a-slidin’ ’cause yer hands are a-drippin’
And yer sun-decked desert and evergreen valleys
Turn to broken down slums and trash-can alleys
And yer sky cries water and yer drain pipe’s a-pourin’
And the lightnin’s a-flashing and the thunder’s a-crashin’
And the windows are rattlin’ and breakin’ and the roof tops a-shakin’
And yer whole world’s a-slammin’ and bangin’
And yer minutes of sun turn to hours of storm
And to yourself you sometimes say
“I never knew it was gonna be this way
Why didn’t they tell me the day I was born”
And you start gettin’ chills and yer jumping from sweat
And you’re lookin’ for somethin’ you ain’t quite found yet
And yer knee-deep in the dark water with yer hands in the air
And the whole world’s a-watchin’ with a window peek stare
And yer good gal leaves and she’s long gone a-flying
And yer heart feels sick like fish when they’re fryin’
And yer jackhammer falls from yer hand to yer feet
And you need it badly but it lays on the street
And yer bell’s bangin’ loudly but you can’t hear its beat
And you think yer ears might a been hurt
Or yer eyes’ve turned filthy from the sight-blindin’ dirt
And you figured you failed in yesterdays rush
When you were faked out an’ fooled while facing a four flush
And all the time you were holdin’ three queens
And it’s makin you mad, it’s makin’ you mean
Like in the middle of Life magazine
Bouncin’ around a pinball machine
And there’s something on yer mind you wanna be saying
That somebody someplace oughta be hearin’
But it’s trapped on yer tongue and sealed in yer head
And it bothers you badly when your layin’ in bed
And no matter how you try you just can’t say it
And yer scared to yer soul you just might forget it
And yer eyes get swimmy from the tears in yer head
And yer pillows of feathers turn to blankets of lead
And the lion’s mouth opens and yer staring at his teeth
And his jaws start closin with you underneath
And yer flat on your belly with yer hands tied behind
And you wish you’d never taken that last detour sign
And you say to yourself just what am I doin’
On this road I’m walkin’, on this trail I’m turnin’
On this curve I’m hanging
On this pathway I’m strolling, in the space I’m taking
In this air I’m inhaling
Am I mixed up too much, am I mixed up too hard
Why am I walking, where am I running
What am I saying, what am I knowing
On this guitar I’m playing, on this banjo I’m frailin’
On this mandolin I’m strummin’, in the song I’m singin’
In the tune I’m hummin’, in the words I’m writin’
In the words that I’m thinkin’
In this ocean of hours I’m all the time drinkin’
Who am I helping, what am I breaking
What am I giving, what am I taking
But you try with your whole soul best
Never to think these thoughts and never to let
Them kind of thoughts gain ground
Or make yer heart pound
But then again you know why they’re around
Just waiting for a chance to slip and drop down
“Cause sometimes you hear’em when the night times comes creeping
And you fear that they might catch you a-sleeping
And you jump from yer bed, from yer last chapter of dreamin’
And you can’t remember for the best of yer thinking
If that was you in the dream that was screaming
And you know that it’s something special you’re needin’
And you know that there’s no drug that’ll do for the healin’
And no liquor in the land to stop yer brain from bleeding
And you need something special
Yeah, you need something special all right
You need a fast flyin’ train on a tornado track
To shoot you someplace and shoot you back
You need a cyclone wind on a stream engine howler
That’s been banging and booming and blowing forever
That knows yer troubles a hundred times over
You need a Greyhound bus that don’t bar no race
That won’t laugh at yer looks
Your voice or your face
And by any number of bets in the book
Will be rollin’ long after the bubblegum craze
You need something to open up a new door
To show you something you seen before
But overlooked a hundred times or more
You need something to open your eyes
You need something to make it known
That it’s you and no one else that owns
That spot that yer standing, that space that you’re sitting
That the world ain’t got you beat
That it ain’t got you licked
It can’t get you crazy no matter how many
Times you might get kicked
You need something special all right
You need something special to give you hope
But hope’s just a word
That maybe you said or maybe you heard
On some windy corner ’round a wide-angled curve
But that’s what you need man, and you need it bad
And yer trouble is you know it too good
“Cause you look an’ you start getting the chills
“Cause you can’t find it on a dollar bill
And it ain’t on Macy’s window sill
And it ain’t on no rich kid’s road map
And it ain’t in no fat kid’s fraternity house
And it ain’t made in no Hollywood wheat germ
And it ain’t on that dimlit stage
With that half-wit comedian on it
Ranting and raving and taking yer money
And you thinks it’s funny
No you can’t find it in no night club or no yacht club
And it ain’t in the seats of a supper club
And sure as hell you’re bound to tell
That no matter how hard you rub
You just ain’t a-gonna find it on yer ticket stub
No, and it ain’t in the rumors people’re tellin’ you
And it ain’t in the pimple-lotion people are sellin’ you
And it ain’t in no cardboard-box house
Or down any movie star’s blouse
And you can’t find it on the golf course
And Uncle Remus can’t tell you and neither can Santa Claus
And it ain’t in the cream puff hair-do or cotton candy clothes
And it ain’t in the dime store dummies or bubblegum goons
And it ain’t in the marshmallow noises of the chocolate cake voices
That come knockin’ and tappin’ in Christmas wrappin’
Sayin’ ain’t I pretty and ain’t I cute and look at my skin
Look at my skin shine, look at my skin glow
Look at my skin laugh, look at my skin cry
When you can’t even sense if they got any insides
These people so pretty in their ribbons and bows
No you’ll not now or no other day
Find it on the doorsteps made out-a paper mache¥
And inside it the people made of molasses
That every other day buy a new pair of sunglasses
And it ain’t in the fifty-star generals and flipped-out phonies
Who’d turn yuh in for a tenth of a penny
Who breathe and burp and bend and crack
And before you can count from one to ten
Do it all over again but this time behind yer back
My friend
The ones that wheel and deal and whirl and twirl
And play games with each other in their sand-box world
And you can’t find it either in the no-talent fools
That run around gallant
And make all rules for the ones that got talent
And it ain’t in the ones that ain’t got any talent but think they do
And think they’re foolin’ you
The ones who jump on the wagon
Just for a while ’cause they know it’s in style
To get their kicks, get out of it quick
And make all kinds of money and chicks
And you yell to yourself and you throw down yer hat
Sayin’, “Christ do I gotta be like that
Ain’t there no one here that knows where I’m at
Ain’t there no one here that knows how I feel
Good God Almighty
THAT STUFF AIN’T REAL”
No but that ain’t yer game, it ain’t even yer race
You can’t hear yer name, you can’t see yer face
You gotta look some other place
And where do you look for this hope that yer seekin’
Where do you look for this lamp that’s a-burnin’
Where do you look for this oil well gushin’
Where do you look for this candle that’s glowin’
Where do you look for this hope that you know is there
And out there somewhere
And your feet can only walk down two kinds of roads
Your eyes can only look through two kinds of windows
Your nose can only smell two kinds of hallways
You can touch and twist
And turn two kinds of doorknobs
You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital
You’ll find God in the church of your choice
You’ll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital
And though it’s only my opinion
I may be right or wrong
You’ll find them both
In the Grand Canyon
At sundown

Bringin’ it all back home …

Bob and Sara

Bob and Joan

Bob and Alan Ginsberg at the grave of Jack Kerouac

21st Century Bob – the Never Ending Tour

That was the year that was – don’t stop (thinking about tomorrow)

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

The prophet’s lantern is out
And gone the boundary stone
Cold the heart and cold the stove
Ice condenses on the bone
Winter completes an age
WH Auden, For the Time Being – a Christmas Oratorio, 1941

I considered using a line from the above as the title of this retrospective of 2022.  It was written during 1941 and 1942, though published in 1947, when the poet was in self-exile in the United States and viewing the war in Europe from afar – although the long poem from which it has been extracted does not in itself reflect such pessimism. A more fitting title could be taken from another long poem that was published in another (very) long poem published in 1947 – Auden’s often overlooked masterpiece The Age of Anxiety, a meditation on a world between the wreckage of The Second World War and of foreboding for the impending armed peace that we now look back on as the Cold War, with its oft-repeated mantra: “many have perished, and more most surely will”.

The year just gone was indeed a gloomy one, meriting a dismal heading. There are few indications of where it might take us in ‘23 and beyond, and my crystal ball is broken. Pundits reached for convenient comparisons. Some propounded that it was like the 1930s all over again when Europe constantly teetered on the brink of war. Others recalled 1989 with the fall of the aneroid Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But, beware of false analogies. In 2022, things were more confused. The tides of history have often resembled swirling cross-currents.

Things, of course, might have been worse. There are, as I’ve noted in successive posts on my own Facebook page, many qualified “reasons to be cheerful”. The  year could have ended with Ukraine under Russian control. An emboldened China might have been encouraged to launch an assault on Taiwan. A red wave in the midterms would have buoyed Trump. And here in Australia, Scott Morrison might have secured another “miracle” election victory. The West could have retreated on all fronts.

Instead, therefore, I have selected a title that hedges its bets, because, to paraphrase the old Chinese adage, and the title of an earlier retrospective, we certainly live in interesting times and in 2023, and a lot of energy will be spent endeavouring to make sense of them – or, to borrow from Bob:

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn that he not busy being born
Is busy dying
B Dylan

The year in review 

Christine McVie, longtime and founder member of Fleetwood Mac departed the planet on 30th November this year. And contemplating this year’s posts in In That Howling Infinite, I could not help thinking about one her most famous songs. I recalled that it featured on newsreels of the revolution that ousted the Shah of Iran in 1979.

Why not think about times to come?
And not about the things that you’ve done
If your life was bad to you
Just think what tomorrow will do
Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow
Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here
It’ll be better than before
Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone

The song seemed quite apposite as the soundtrack of a revolution that had overthrown one of America’s many friendly autocrats. At the time, no one could predict what would happen, but, as with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was a time optimistic expectation. And yet its shock waves have reverberated and ricocheted in ways unimagined at the time.

As 2022 ends, with blood flowing on the streets of Iran and in the mullahs’s torture cells as young people rise up against a hypocritically brutal theocratic tyranny, we see again and again how that which goes around comes around.

Women, Freedom, Life

If the malign hand of history has literally reached out and gripped Iran’s young women and girls by their hair, it has also endeavoured to strangle the thousand year old Ukrainian nation in the name of an atavistic irredentism. Russian troops invaded the Ukraine on February 24, causing what has since become the largest conflict in Europe since World War II. Out if the spotlight of the world’s easily distracted attention. intractable conflicts lumbered mercilessly on – in Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, the Congo and many other “far away  places with strange sounding names”.  

On the far side of the world, the USA continued to struggle with the reverberations of January 6th 2021. Donald Trump, like Dracula, has not gone away, and whilst his 2024 presidential run is looking increasingly shaky, he continues to poison the atmosphere like radioactive dust. The unfortunate folk of the United Kingdom endured three prime ministers during the year, including the shortest ever in the history of the office, and after two years of pandemic, are facing a bleak economic winter as well as a frigid actual one.

In Australia, it was the year of the teal – at least according to those who study the evolution of language, the year we lost a queen, our long-serving foreign head of state, and a king of spin, the down-fallen and disgraced Scott Morrison. And a sodden La Nina saw incessant rain drown large swathes of eastern Australia, visiting misery on thousands. COVID-19 mutated, the Omicron variant surging from beginning of the year, ensuring no end to the pandemic – today, it seems like everyone we know has had it, including ourselves (and we were soooo careful for a full two years!). As restrictions were cautiously lifted, we as a nation are learning to live with it. 

Politically, it’s been a grand year for the Australian Labor Party. With our stunning Federal election win in May and in Victoria in November, the Albanese government’s star is on the ascendant and it’s legislative record in six months has out run nine years of Tory stagnation on climate, integrity and equality – a neglect that saw the rise of a new political force in the shape of a proto-party, the aforementioned “teal”, named for the colour of the candidates’ tee shirts. The opposition has been reduced to a bickering and carping crew, and whilst Labor continues to ride high in the polls, the Coalition bounces along the bottom of the pond.

Lismore, northern NSW, March 2023

Flooded house aflame, Lismore March 2022

Christine McVie was just one of many music icons who checked out this past year. The coal miner’s daughter, Loretta Lynn, crooned her last, as did rock ‘n roll bad boy Jerry Lee Lewis and Ronnie “the Hawk” Hawkins, who gave the boys in The Band their big break. Rock heavyweight (literally) Meatloaf took off like his bat out of hell and keyboard evangelist Vangelis boarded his chariot of fire.

Acclaimed British author Hilary Mantel, whose Wolf Hall trilogy inspired back to back posts in In That Howling Infinite in 2020 found “a place of greater safety”, and French author Dominique Lapierre also joined the choir invisible. I had first learned about Israel’s war of independence and the Palestinians’ al Nakba in his O Jerusalem, and about the bloody tragedy that accompanied the birth of India and Pakistan, in Freedom at Midnight, both books featuring in past posts. 

Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis as Tom and Hal

One could argue that the most significant departure was that of Britain’s longest serving monarch. Queen Elizabeth II had been on the throne for almost all of my life, as has the now King Charles III who was born four months before me, and of whom, as a nipper, I was jealous. I recall how I watched the queen’s coronation on a tiny black and white television in the crowded and smokey parlour of the boarding house run by a friend of our family. By happenstance, Netflix served up two over the top regal sagas to binge on: the penultimate season of The Crown, which whilst entertaining, was a disappointment in comparison with earlier seasons, and Harry and Meghan which was whilst excruciatingly cringe-worthy, was nevertheless addictive viewing. The passing of Her Maj reminded me that in my lifetime, I have witnessed three monarchs and eighteen British prime ministers (and incidentally, eighteen Australian prime ministers).  The public outpouring of grief for the Queen’s ascent to the choir invisible was unprecedented – the picture below demonstrates what the Poms do best …

The Queue along the Thames to pay respect to Her Maj

There were farewells much closer to home. My mediation colleague, aspiring author and friend John Rosley, and Beau Tindall, the son of my oldest Bellingen friend Warren, took off on the same day in May. Peter Setterington, my oldest friend in England – we first met in 1972 – died suddenly in London in March, and our friend and forest neighbour, the world-famous war photographer Tim Page, in August, after a short but nasty illness. Pete is memorialized in When an Old Cricketer Leave His Crease whilst Journey’s end – Tim Page’s wild ride,is an adaptation of the eulogy I gave for Tim in September, one of many on that sunny afternoon day in Fernmount. It is a coda to Tim Page’s  War – a photographer’s  Vietnam journey, a story we published a year ago.

Tim Page by Joanne Booker

What we wrote in 2022

The ongoing Ukraine War has dominated our perception of 2022, from the morning (Australian time) we watched it begin on CNN as the first Russian missiles struck Kyiv, to the aerial assault on infrastructure that has left Ukrainians sheltering through a cold, dark winter. Two posts in In That Howling Infinite examined the historical origins of the conflict: Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism and The Roots and Fruits of Putin’s Irridentism. “Because of …” Iran’s voice of freedom looks at the song that has become the rising’s anthem. None can predict the outcome – whether it will be a doomed intifada, the Arabic word that literally means a shaking off – historically of oppression – and figuratively, a rising up, like that in Ireland in 1798 and 1916, Warsaw in 1943 and 1945, and Hungary in 1956, or an Inqilab, another Arabic word meaning literally change or transformation, overturning or revolution.

The run up to May’s Australian elections inspired Teal independents – false reality in a fog of moralism.; and Australia votes – the decline and fall of the flimflam man. 

More distant history featured in Menzie’s Excellent Suez Adventure, the story of the Suez crisis of 1956 that historians argue augured the end of the British imperium, and the role played therein by longtime Australian prime minister Sir Robert Menzies. Johnny Clegg and the Washing of the Spears is a tribute to the late South African singer, dancer and songwriter, and a brief history of the war that destroyed the great Zulu nation, setting the scene for the modern history of South Africa. And journeying further back in time to sixteenth century Ireland, there is O’Donnell Abú – the Red Earl and history in a song, a discussion of the origins of a famous and favorite rebel song.

Then there are the semi-biographical “micro-histories” in In That Howling Infinite’s Tall tales, small stories, obituaries and epiphanies. In 2023, these included: Folksong Au Lapin Agile, the evening we visited Montmarte’s famous folk cabaret; Ciao Pollo di Soho – the café at the end of the M1, the story of a café that played a minor part in my London days, as described in detail in an earlier travelogue, Song of the Road – my hitchhiking days; Better read than dead – the joy of public libraries; The quiet tea time of the soul, an ode in prose to a favourite beverage; and The work, the working, the working life recalling the many jobs I took on in the sixties to keep myself in music, books, travel and sundry vices. 

We cannot pass a year without something literary. We celebrated the centenary of three iconic literary classics in The year that changed literature, and with the release of The Rings of Power, the controversial prequel to The Lord of the Rings, we published a retrospective on the influence of JRR Tolkien. One ring to rule us all – does Tolkien matter? – a personal perspective with an opinion piece by English historian Dominic Sandbrook, an informative and entertaining chronicler of postwar British history and society which featured, in Unherd, an online e-zine that became a “must read” in 2022. A Son Goes To War – the grief of Rudyard Kipling recalls the death in battle on the Western Front in 1917 of the poet’s only son, it’s influence upon his subsequent work, whilst Muzaffar al Nawab, poet of revolutions and sorrow is an obituary for another poet, who seen a lifetime speaking truth to power.

And that was that for what was in so man ways a sad year. Meanwhile, In That Howling Infinite already has several works in progress, including a review of historian Anthony Beevor’s Russia – Revolution and Civil War, what King Herod really thought about the birth of baby Jesus, and the story of a famous and favourite British army marching song.

Best wishes for 2023 …

Death of a Son

That was the year that was – retrospectives

Life in Wartime – images of Ukraine

“Because of …” Iran’s voice of freedom

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom
Maya Angelou

زن زندگی آزادی  Zan zandaky āzādy  Women freedom life

In our relatively comfortable, free and still democratic countries, it is difficult to put ourselves in the position of people desperate and passionate enough to risk life and limb and to face the terrible consequences of potentially heroic failure. We can but sense, vicariously, the ache and the urge behind Maya Angelous’s poem The caged bird sings of freedom (above) and Lord Byron’s passionate couplet:

Yet, Freedom! thy banner, torn, but flying,
Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind.

The courage of the of the Iranian protesters, and particularly the woman and girls who have been the vanguard of this unprecedented intifada cannot be exaggerated. For brave they are indeed. Having endured long years of a brutal and vengeful, corrupt and misogynistic theocratic regime and its security and paramilitary enforcers, they are fully aware of the consequences of their actions.

Several weeks, the nationwide protests that followed the murder in custody of a young woman arrested by the morality police after wearing her hijab inappropriately, and other young women and also, now, young men, who, officially, have died at their own hand or of pre-existing causes, have mobilized Iranians of all ethnicities, classes, ages and genders. And the security state us reacted predictably, red in tooth and claw. There is torture and death actual and awaiting on the streets of villages, towns and cities throughout the country, and the public trials with their black-garbed and turbaned hanging judges are in place and ready to protect the nation and the revolution in the name of Allah and the legacy of the canonised grey and dour uber-mullah Ayatollah Khomeini.

The perseverance and nihilistic exuberance of the Iranian street has reminded me of an exhilarating song and video created by a young Egyptian and his friends celebrating the demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that precipitated the fall of practically Egyptian president-for-life Hosni Mubarak thirteen  years ago last February. Sawt Al Huriya (The Voice of Freedom), went viral on YouTube after its release on 11 February 2011, the day before Mubarak’s departure?

Fast forward to the present, and we examine why the Islamic Republic’s  sclerotic theocratic regime is so afraid of another song of revolution, the crowd sourced protest anthem, Baraya, which has become a thorn in the side of the government in Tehran.

Baraye, translated as “because of …” or “for …”, the anthem of Iran’s Woman, Life, Liberty protest movement grew organically from a Twitter hashtag trend in which Iranians expressed their uncountable discontents and their commitment to the protests. It continues to unite Iranians in their opposition to the rules, restriction nd repression of Islamic Republic weeks after it was first released online on an international and social media that the authorities have tried and failed to silence. To paraphrase Canadian songwriter and activist for injustice and the environment in his song Santiago Dawn (see below) to keep millions down “takes more than a strong arm up your sleeve”.

Bareya’s lyrics were created by the Iranians themselves and gathered and set to music , recorded, sung and shared by a young Iranian singer, Shervin Hajipour. Crazy brave, perhaps for predictably, he was detained by security operatives soon after he posted it on his Instagram page and forced to remove it from his feed. But it had already attracted millions of views worldwide and continued to be shared and shared and shared, and it has now been played and performed the world over as people across the glob empathize, identify with, and add to the images verbalised and the emotions these engender. We all have stories to relate of oppression and exclusion, of the abuse of power and privilege and the pervasiveness of prejudice and discrimination. To quote Bruce Cockburn once more about an earlier resistance, “see them matching home, see them rising like grass through cement in the Santiago dawn”.

Baraja gives voice to the voiceless – as Bob Dylan sang in another century, in comparatively  straightened times:

For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worseAn’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universeAn’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing

The Recording Academy, which hosts the annual Grammy Awards, announced that in its new merit category for best song for social change, more than 80% of nominations were for Baraye. Below is a video of the world-famous band Cold Play singing the song in Buenos Aires with Iranian actor Goldshifte Farahani.

The genesis of Baraya mirrors the organizational structure of the protests themselves insofar as like these, it is networked and leaderless, Ironically, however, David Patrikarakos editor of the e-zine Unherd wrote recently, this lack of leadership portends the protests’ doom:

“No leader has yet emerged. Instead, the protests are organised by different people or groups in different cities and towns on an almost ad hoc basis.The truth is that if the mullahs were to collapse tomorrow, there are no signs that a democratic movement would sweep to power …It is far more likely that the security state — led by the Revolutionary Guard Corps — would step into the void and make apparent what is already largely a fact: that Iran is no longer a clerical state but is now ruled by a Praetorian Guard …

… In 1979, Iranians held up images of Khomeini. In 2022, they tear them down. They know they want the regime gone but they have no one to hold up in its place. For a revolution to succeed, it’s not enough to be against someone; you have to be for someone else. It’s not enough that Khamenei loses. Someone else must win. Until that time, the mullahs will continue to cling on as murderously and barbarously as they always have, and Iranians will continue to die. For years Palestinians would say they needed a Saladin. They were wrong. What they need is a Ben Gurion. What the Iranian revolutionaries need now more than anything else is a Khomeini. Until that happens, this will only ever be half a revolution”.

At this moment in time, the outcome of that revolution hangs in the balance. The passion of the people for a better world is once again going up against the iron fist of the security state. Sadly, history past and present, in Iran and elsewhere, has shown us that when an irresistible force comes up against an immovable object, no matter how popular, righteous and justified that force may be, the immovable object invariably wins.

Meanwhile, hope springs eternal …

Our weapon was our dreams.
And we could see tomorrow clearly.
We have been waiting for so long.
Searching, and never finding our place.
In every street in my country,
The voice of freedom is calling.
Sawt al Huriya

Baraya … Because of 

Because of dancing in the street
Because of fear while kissing
Because of my sister, your sister, our sister
Because of changing rotten minds

Because of shame for moneyless
Because of yearning for an ordinary life
Because of the scavenger kid and his dreams
Because of a command economy

Because of air pollution
Because of ‘Vali Asr’ Avenue, and its dying trees
Because of a cheetah (Pirouz) that may go extinct
Because of innocent, outlawed dogs

Because of the incessant crying
For the image to repeat this moment
Because of the smiling face
For students, for the future
Because of students, for the future

Because of this forced paradise
Because of the imprisoned elites
Because of Afghan kids
Because of all (Because of…) non-repetitive

Because of all these empty slogans
Because of the rubble of fake houses
Because of the feeling of peace
Because of the sun after a long night

Because of the nerve pills and insomnia
Because of man, country, rebuilding
Because of a girl who wished she was a boy
Because of woman, life, freedom

Because of freedom

Because of Mahsa Amini

See also in In That Howling Infinite, Sawt al Hurriya – remembering the Arab Spring, Messing with the Mullahs – America’s phoney war?. and A Middle East Miscellany

Why Is Iran’s Regime So Afraid Of This Song?

Nahid Shamdouz,  assistant professor of Middle East and Media Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, Foreign Policy, 26th October 2022
Demonstrators sing "Baraye" while holding their phone lights high during a march in support of protests in Iran.

Demonstrators sing “Baraye” while holding their phone lights high during a march in support of protests in Iran. Allison Bailey, Reuters. 26th October 2021

“Baraye,” the anthem of Iran’s “Woman, Life, Liberty” protest movement—a song woven together entirely from a Twitter hashtag trend in which Iranians express their investment in the current protests—continues to unite Iranians in their opposition to the Islamic Republic several weeks after it was first released online.

For Iranians in Iran but also for the millions in the diaspora, this is the song of a generation, perfectly expressing this political moment and all that is at stake.

For dancing in the alleyways
Because of the fear you feel when kissing
For my sister, your sister, our sisters
To change the minds that have rotted away
Because of shame, because of being broke
Because of yearning for an ordinary life  

What makes this moment different from previous periods of protest is that the wall of acquiescence and pretense that maintained the state’s authority in the public realm has been torn down on a scale not seen since the 1979 revolution. In its recounting of all the painful grievances, “Baraye,” which translates in English to “for” or “because of,” signals the end of patience with the status quo and opens vistas onto a new future with a vocal crescendo that culminates in the word “freedom.”

The song reveals the simple, ordinary nature of the things that Iranians are aching for, asking for, and even dying for. It is radical in revealing on a national level the cruelty of a system that denies such basic demands—exposing the devastating conditions Iranians face under the current regime.

“Baraye” creates national intimacy by citing very specific events that all Iranians have suffered through together, in a palimpsest of collective traumas.

If “Baraye” reflects a different, perhaps unprecedented mood on a national level, it also mirrors the organizational structure of this recent protest movement. If it is networked and leaderless, so is the song. The lyrics were written by Iranians at large and merely set to music and vocalized by the young up-and-coming singer Shervin Hajipour. This explains why security forces detained Hajipour a couple of days after he posted it on his Instagram page, where it had already accrued millions of views. The regime has tried for years to push the apparent and already real aspects of people’s lives out of the public sphere.

On social media, Iranians have created a life that more closely mirrors their inner selves—replete with harsh criticism of leading clerics including Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; female solo vocalists who are otherwise banned singing at the top of their lungs; and the exhibition of private lives that are anything but a reflection of the state’s projected pious paradise. Still, the state has sought to maintain a semblance of its ideology and control in actual public spaces and its media.

“Baraye” has broken that violently imposed wall between the state’s enforced reality and people’s real lives. It forced into the open, in the face of authority, all that people have known for long but were not supposed to express openly on such a national dimension.

For the sake of a laughing face
For schoolkids, for the future
Because of this mandatory paradise
For imprisoned intellectuals

Since its release, the song has become the single most covered protest song in Iran’s history. Within a few short weeks after Hajipour composed the music for it, musicians across Iran and beyond its borders have sung it verbatim in their own voices, translated it, and sung it in other languages—and even universalized the lyrics for a more global audience.

Last week, the Iranian rapper Hichkas released a militant hip-hop track referencing “Baraye” through the more casual rap lingo “vase,” enumerating his reasons, starting with “vase Mahsa” (for Mahsa Jina Amini, whose death at the hands of Iran’s morality police sparked the protests) and ending with “for a good day,” in a nod to his own 2009 Green Movement protest song.

Mahsa Amini protest in Iran

Mahsa Amini Protest in Iran

 
Protesters gather in London on Oct. 1 in solidarity with people protesting across Iran.

Protesters gather in London on Oct. 1 in solidarity with people protesting across Iran.

Indeed, the expressed concerns wrapped up in the short tweets shown in Hajipour’s video, and in the #Mahsa_Amini hashtag itself, are quite universal—the precarious condition of the planet, drastic inequalities, the desire for a peaceful life—which is why the song has become resonant with so many people around the world as well.

For the garbage-picking kid and her dreams
Because of this command economy
Because of this polluted air …
For a feeling of peace
For the sun after long nights

At the same time, “Baraye” creates national intimacy by citing very specific events that all Iranians have suffered through together, in a palimpsest of collective traumas. Hajipour sings “For the image of this moment repeating again,” drawn from a tweet with a photo of Hamed Esmaeilion and his young daughter relaxing together on a couch reading newspapers. (His wife and 9-year-old daughter were killed when Iran’s Revolutionary Guards mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian airliner leaving Tehran in January 2020, and Esmaeilion has become the face of the grief affecting all those who lost loved ones in the crash.)

This line resonates with Iranians because so many families have been torn apart by the country’s massive brain drain, caused by a closed and corrupt economy that offers few opportunities.

In other lines, Hajipour sings sarcastically “Because of this mandatory paradise,” referring to the theocratic state’s imposed restrictions, justified in the name of achieving an Islamic utopia.

In yet another, he sings of “houses in rubble,” pointing to collapsing buildings caused by the rampant nepotism and corruption that shield state-connected builders from transparency on safety measures. In another, he sings of the “imprisoned intellectuals,” in a nod not just to the hundreds of journalists, human rights lawyers, and filmmakers but even award-winning university students who have been locked up.

The chorus arising from hundreds of tweets is clear: This is a regime that seems to be against life itself, punishing dancing, kissing, and smiling faces.

The song’s singular overnight success is not a small achievement given the long, rich history of protest songs in Iran. Already at the time of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution in 1906, poets created songs about the spilled blood of the youth who agitated for representative government and, not long after, about the Morning Bird breaking the cage of oppression, which many decades later became one of the most intoned protest songs in post-revolutionary Iran.

The trajectory of Iran’s musical history clearly exhibited a century-long struggle for freedom and justice, not yet realized.

Although “Baraye” and other songs of the current protest movement continue this strong tradition, they break with the post-revolutionary legacy on one key point: They no longer call for reforms.

At the time of the last major convulsions in 2009, many activists and musicians of the Green Movement called forth songs from the 1979 revolution to stake a claim to the revolution’s original yet unattained promises. People wore headscarves and wristbands in the green of Imam Hussain and went to their rooftops to shout “Allahu akbar” to invoke God’s help against a corrupt, earthly power.

But this time around, there are no religious signifiers or any demands for reforms. If classical songs are performed, they are not the icon Mohammad Reza Shajarian’s conciliatory song Language of Fire in 2009, when Iranians were still agitating for reforms from within, but his militant 1979 song Night Traveler, (also known as “Give Me My Gun”) in which he calls “sitting in silence” a sin and asks for his gun so he can join the struggle. One of Shajarian’s masterful female protégés posted the song with the hashtag #Mahsa_Amini and swapped “the brother” out of the verses to sing “The sister is an adolescent, the sister is drowning in blood,” in recognition of the teenage girls who have given their lives in the protests.

The state security system instantly understood the significance of “Baraye” as a protest song. Hajipour was forced to take it off his Instagram account; however, not only has his song already been shared widely by other accounts and on other platforms, but the sentiments behind the lyrics are within the millions of people who wrote them.

The chants of “Death to the Dictator” have reverberated from the streets to the universities, from oil refineries to urban rooftops, and from bazaars to school courtyards. And so have the haunting calls for freedom repeatedly intoned at the end of “Baraye,” pouring forth from every corner of the actual and virtual Iranian public sphere.

That song’s reality can no longer be repressed and hidden by force.

Song lyrics in this article are based in part on Zuzanna Olszewska’s translations.

Nahid Siamdoust is an assistant professor of Middle East and Media Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran.

Folksong Au Lapin Agile

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

It was a cold wet windy night in May as we wound our way up to Montmarte, arriving at our destination, an old stone building on the steep and cobbled Rue des Saules. It was after nine o’clock and we were late – the evening’s entertainment had commenced. The man who greeted us at the door asked us to wait until a song had finished and then ushered us into a a dimly-lit cellar-like room, its walls festooned with an eclectic collection of pictures, wooden tables and chairs, and stout benches pushed against the walls.

A bad start! The master of ceremonies, an eccentric chap with the air of an impatient headmaster gave us a stern look of disapproval as we took our seats in a corner at a wooden covered with initials that had been carved into its surface over decades – as if to say “bloody tourists!” A friendly chap bad us “bon soir” and served us glasses of the obligatory, sweet house red; and thenceforward, he, Le Maître, and the audience, who all appeared to be old pals, ignored us completely. Nevertheless, the evening was a hoot as our headmaster led the room in songs which everyone sang loudly and with gusto. All in French – we sang along when we knew the words. There were a couple of what us folkies would call “floor acts”, one a young man who reminded us of a friend of ours back in Oz, and a chirpy accordionist who seemed to have come straight out of French cabaret central casting.

 

Le Maître,

Welcome to Au Lapin Agile, the famous and venerable Parisian cabaret cum folk club in the centre of  Montmartre (in the 18th arrondissement not far from the Basilica Sacre Coeur), where people gather and sing old French songs accompanied by guitar, piano and accordion. The musicians encourage the audience to join in with the singing so it helps if you speak French or are a quick learner – or if, like us, you remember the choruses from school days, including the famous Allouette, Frère Jacque and Les Chevaliers du Table Ronde (it’s about boozing and not King Arthur).

It’s been going literally forever – the mid-nineteenth century, anyway – and was originally called Cabaret des Assassins. So named, ‘tis said, because a band of assassins broke once in and killed the owner’s son. It had also been called Rendezvous Des Voleurs or “Thieves Meeting Place – which says something about the provenance of the punters back in the day.

It was over twenty years old when, in 1875, the artist Andre Gill painted the sign that suggested its permanent name – the picture of a rabbit jumping out of a saucepan. Locals started calling their neighborhood night-club Le Lapin à Gill, or “Gill’s rabbit’, and in time, this evolved into Cabaret Au Lapin Agile, or “The Nimble Rabbit Cabaret”.

Befitting its early reputation, Au Lapin Agile became popular with dubious Montmartre characters,   including pimps, eccentrics, simple down-and-outers, a contingent of local anarchists, and students from the Latin Quarter, a sprinkling of well-heeled bourgeois out on a lark. and show business types like Parisian cabaret singer and comedian Aristide Bruand, the subject of a popular painting by Montmartre artist Toulouse Lautrec. When, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Au Lapin Agile was facing closure, Bruand bought the joint and handed the tenancy to Frédéric Gerard, known to all as Frédé.

It became a great venue for budding musicians to make their debuts and also a regular haunt for impoverished artists. Picasso, Modigliani, Apollinaire and Utrillo would spend their evenings immersed in philosophical debate and music. Often Frédé would accept paintings from the artists in payment for their drinks – Picasso gave Frédé an artwork actually called Au Lapin Agile which portrayed himself dressed as a harlequin sitting in the cabaret with a female companion. Frédé is also in the picture, playing the guitar in the background. In 1912, Frédé sold the painting for $20. In 1989, it went to auction at Sothebys and sold for $41 million. A replica of Picasso’s painting is on the far wall in the interior image below – the walls are covered with similar stuff. The original is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The painting helped to make the cabaret world famous. The cabaret was also captured on canvas by Maurice Utrillo.

Au Laoin Agile – Arelquin tenant un verre by Pablo Picasso

Since the place was at the heart of artistic Paris at the turn of the twentieth century, it became a mecca for visiting artists and writers, including Ernest Hemingway and Charlie Chaplin, who would play his violin there. There was much discussion at the cabaret about “the meaning of art”, which inspired American comedian and entertainer, Steve Martin to write a play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile (1993) imagining a meeting there between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein. We saw it at Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre and thought it so good, we returned the following week to see it again – and bumped into film star Ralph Fiennes in the foyer during pre-play drinks (though we weren’t introduced).

We never imagined that the place actually existed and that one day, we’d one day go there!

© Paul Hemphill 2022.  All rights reserved

See also in In That Howling Infinite, Ciao Pollo di Soho – memories of a classic café ; The Incorrigible Optimists Club – Jean-Michel Guenassia’s debut masterpiece; and Tall Tales, Small Stories, Eulogies and Obituaries 

Back when Le Maître,was much younger

Little has changed

 

O’Donnell Abú – the Red Earl and history in a song

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

There is history in old songs, and particularly in the songs that tell the story of a nation’s resistance to invasion and occupation. Ireland’s long and troubled relationship with its powerful neighbour across the water has inspired a compendium of such songs of rebellion.

One of my favourites, Let Erin Remember, encapsulates it: “

On Lough Neagh’s banks as the fisherman strays
In the clear cold eve declining
He sees the round towers of other days
In the waters ‘neath him shining
Thus shall memory often in dreams sublime
Catch a glimpse of the days that are over
Thus sighing, look through the waves of time
For the long-faded glories they cover

In That Howling Infinite has published two essays about old Irish songs and their colourful history, Mo Ghile Mear and The Boys of Wexford. What follows is a song contemporary  to these in composition, but takes us back a century and a half to Ireland’s struggle against the Tudor crown in the late sixteenth century.

O’Donnell Abú (Ó Domhnaill Abú) is a traditional Irish song. Its lyrics were written by Michael Joseph McCann, a Fenian, in 1843. It tells of the Gaelic lord Red Hugh O’Donnell who ruled Tyrconnell (present day County Donegal) in the late sixteenth century first with the approval of the Crown authorities in Dublin and later in rebellion against them during Tyrone’s Rebellion.

Hugh Rua O’Donnell (Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill), also known as Red Hugh O’Donnell (30 October 1572 – 10 September 1602), was a sixteenth-century Irish nobleman who, with his father-in-law Hugh O’Neill of Tyrone, led an alliance of Irish clans in the Nine Years’ War against the English government in Ireland. He led an Irish army to victory in the Battle of Curlew Pass, but after defeat in the Siege of Kinsale, he travelled to Spain to in an unsuccessful effort to obtain support from King Philip III. He never returned to Ireland and he died in Spain.

There is no extant portrait or visual representation of Red Hugh though a contemporary suggested that he was “above middle height, strong, handsome, well built”. An idealised image of Red Hugh is this post’s featured image. Romantics picture the youthful Red Hugh as fiery, headstrong, quick-witted, passionate, committed to Catholicism, and to the preservation of the values, language, and culture of the Gaelic world into which he had been born and reared. Above all, he is determined to rid Ireland of its English overlords.

Though limited and often biased against him, extant historical records largely validate this portrayal. They also recapture the complexities of Red Hugh’s highly militarized world, where local lords raided for cattle and reduced neighbouring lords to submission, and show Red Hugh to be a wily negotiator, an effective and pragmatic power broker, and a brave soldier.

Hugh Rua O’Donnell
Hugh Rua O’Donnell
The Flight of Red Hugh

The title refers to the Gaelic war cry of “Abú,” “To victory,” which followed a commander’s name, and is the rallying cry for the O’Donnell clan, called to assemble at a location on the banks of the River Erne in Donegal. The Bonnaught and Gallowglass were Irish and Scots mercenaries employed by O’Donnell to guard the mountain passes. They were now summoned to join the rest of O’Donnell’s forces, who await the arrival of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone and the Borderers who protect his lands.

Stylistically O’Donnell Abú draws on the romantic nationalism of the mid-nineteenth century, similar to those of Michael McCann’s contemporary Young Ireland nationalist Thomas Davis. who composed a number of songs, including The West’s Asleep“, A Nation Once Again“, and the Lament for Owen Roe O’Neill  set to an 16th Centryu compoition bt celebrated harpist  

The song’s martial melody is proud and energetic, and its descriptive imagery is striking. You can almost visualize the war wolf and the eagle, the fires of the marauders, and the serried ranks of horsemen and foot soldiers in their chain mail advancing to avenge “Erin” with trumpets and war cries. To modern ears, the neo-Gothic romanticism of the lyrics and the aggressiveness of the melody may come across as jingoistic and over the top, but passionate nationalist McCann was probably endeavouring to emulate the bards of old. A stirring rendering of the song follows in a spirited live performance by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. This world famous folk group was an especial favourite of mine back in my teenage and folkie days.

Proudly the note of the trumpet is sounding;
Loudly the war cries arise on the gale;
Fleetly the steed by Lough Swilly is bounding,
To join the thick squadrons on Saimear‘s green vale.
On, ev’ry mountaineer, strangers to flight or fear,
Rush to the standard of dauntless Red Hugh.
Bonnaught and Gallowglass, throng from each mountain pass.
On for old Erin, “O’Donnell Abú!”

Princely O’Neill to our aid is advancing
With many a chieftain and warrior clan.
A thousand proud steeds in his vanguard are prancing
‘Neath the borderers brave from the Banks of the Bann:
Many a heart shall quail under its coat of mail.
Deeply the merciless foeman shall rue
When on his ears shall ring, borne on the breeze’s wing,
Tír Chonaill‘s dread war-cry, “O’Donnell Abú!”

Wildly o’er Desmond the war-wolf is howling;
Fearless the eagle sweeps over the plain;
The fox in the streets of the city is prowling–
All who would scare them are banished or slain!
Grasp ev’ry stalwart hand
Hackbut and battle brand–
Pay them all back the debt so long due;
Norris and Clifford well can of Tirconnell tell;
Onward to glory–“O’Donnell abú!”

Sacred the cause that Clan Connell’s defending–
The altars we kneel at and homes of our sires;
Ruthless the ruin the foe is extending–
Midnight is red with the plunderer’s fires.
On with O’Donnell then, fight the old fight again,
Sons of Tirconnell, all valiant and true:
Make the proud  Saxon feel Erin’s avenging steel!
Strike for your country! “O’Donnell Abú!’

The hyperlinks in the song link specific names to their Wikipedia references, but here is a brief glossary:

Bonnaught is type of billeting or a billeted soldier. From Irish buannacht, billeting or billeting tax. A gallowglass (from gallóglach) was a Scottish Gaelic mercenary soldier in Ireland between mid 13th and late 16th centuries. A hackbut is a harquebuss or arquebus, the first long-arm gun fired from the shoulder. John Norris and Conyers Clifford were English commanders who fought O’Donnel and O’Neill, whilst Tír Chonaill, a kingdom of Gaelic Ireland, associated geographically with present-day County Donegal the home of the the Ó Domhnaill clan. It was the location of fighting during the Nine Years’ War

The Red Earl and the Dark Daughter

“It is hard to think, looking at the peaceful countryside of modern Donegal, “writes Ciaran Conliffe in an excellent post on his Scribbler blog, “that in days gone by men fought, bled and died on these hills. But the history of Ireland, up until relatively recently, was one of almost constant strife”. So begins his enthralling tale of Red Hugh and his feisty mother Iníon Dubh. Read it HERE

An impassioned ballad, entitled in the original Roisin Duh (or The Black Little Rose), was written in the reign of Elizabeth by one of the poets of Red Hugh’s entourage, and translated by nationalist mid-19th Century Irish poet James Clarence Mangan. It is an allegorical address by Hugh to Ireland, represented in this and many other Irish songs as a beautiful woman, of his love and his struggles for her, and of his resolve to raise her again to the glorious position she held as a nation before the irruption of the Saxon and Norman spoilers – for that’s how the romantic poets saw it: “Sons of Tirconnell, all valiant and true: make the proud  Saxon feel Erin’s avenging steel! Strike for your country! “O’Donnell Abú!'”

Donegal, Norther Ireland

The Red Hand

Red Hugh’s soldiers had their war cry with O’Donnell Abú. That of the O’Neill clan, led in O’Donnell’s ally Hugh O’Neill of Tyrone, was Lámh Dhearg Abú! – The Red Hand to Victory!

The Red Hand symbol and the war cry are believed to have been used by the O’Neills during the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603) against English rule in Ireland, A contemporary English writer observed: “The Ancient Red Hand of Ulster, the bloody Red Hand, a terrible cognizance! And in allusion to that terrible cognizance—the battle cry of Lámh Dhearg Abú!”

The motif of the Red Hand is a common one in Irish and particularly Ulster folklore. It originated in in Gaelic culture and, although its origin and meaning are unknown, it is believed to date back to pre-Christian times. There is a theory that the ancient Phoenicians may have brought the symbol to Ireland. able seamen and adventurous traders that they were, the Phoenicians of the Levant did indeed venture as far as what are now the British Isles.

A story is also told that the Red Hand symbol originated in a legendary ancestor who put his bloodstained hand on a banner after victory in battle. Bards and balladeers argue its origins, harking back to real and legendary heroes and kings, and commonly relating to shedding the blood of enemies. It was adopted by the O’Neills around 1335. Whilst demonstrating their ancient lineage, they may also may have regarded it as signifying divine assistance and strength.

The Red Hand is present in the arms of a number of Ulster’s counties, such as Antrim, Cavan, Londonderry, Monaghan and Tyrone. Itt also appears in the Ulster Banner, and is used by many other official and non-official organisations throughout the province. It can be regarded as one of the very few cross-community symbols used in Northern Ireland (which makes up six of Ulster’s nine counties) crossing the sectarian political divide.

For other historical posts in In That Howling Infinite, see: Foggy Ruins o Time – from history’s pages 

Let Erin Remember

Tradional

Let Erin remember the days of old
Ere her faithless sons betrayed her
When Malachy wore the collar of gold
That he won from the proud invader
When her kings with standards of green unfurled
Led the Red Branch Knights to danger
Ere the emerald gem of the Western World
Was set in the crown of a stranger

On Lough Neagh’s banks as the fisherman strays
In the clear cold eve declining
He sees the round towers of other days
In the waters ‘neath him shining
Thus shall memory often in dreams sublime
Catch a glimpse of the days that are over
Thus sighing, look through the waves of time
For the long-faded glories they cover

Dark Rosaleen

James Clarence Mangan

O my dark Rosaleen,
Do not sigh, do not weep!
The priests are on the ocean green,
They march along the deep.
There’s wine from the royal Pope,
Upon the ocean green;
And Spanish ale shall give you hope,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!

Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope,
Shall give you health, and help, and hope,
My Dark Rosaleen!

Over hills, and thro’ dales,
Have I roam’d for your sake;
All yesterday I sail’d with sails
On river and on lake.
The Erne, at its highest flood,
I dash’d across unseen,
For there was lightning in my blood,
My Dark Rosaleen!

My own Rosaleen!
O, there was lightning in my blood,
Red lighten’d thro’ my blood.
My Dark Rosaleen!

All day long, in unrest,
To and fro, do I move.
The very soul within my breast
Is wasted for you, love!
The heart in my bosom faints
To think of you, my Queen,
My life of life, my saint of saints,
My Dark Rosaleen!

My own Rosaleen!
To hear your sweet and sad complaints,
My life, my love, my saint of saints,
My Dark Rosaleen!
Woe and pain, pain and woe,
Are my lot, night and noon,
To see your bright face clouded so,
Like to the mournful moon.
But yet will I rear your throne
Again in golden sheen;
‘Tis you shall reign, shall reign alone,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
‘Tis you shall have the golden throne,
‘Tis you shall reign, and reign alone,

Over dews, over sands,
Will I fly, for your weal:
Your holy delicate white hands
Shall girdle me with steel.
At home, in your emerald bowers,
From morning’s dawn till e’en,
You’ll pray for me, my flower of flowers,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My fond Rosaleen!
You’ll think of me through daylight hours
My virgin flower, my flower of flowers,
My Dark Rosaleen!

I could scale the blue air,
I could plough the high hills,
Oh, I could kneel all night in prayer,
To heal your many ills!
And one beamy smile from you
Would float like light between
My toils and me, my own, my true,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My fond Rosaleen!
Would give me life and soul anew,
My Dark Rosaleen!

O, the Erne shall run red,
With redundance of blood,
The earth shall rock beneath our tread,
And flames wrap hill and wood,
And gun-peal and slogan-cry
Wake many a glen serene,
Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die,
My Dark Rosaleen!

My own Rosaleen!
The Judgement Hour must first be nigh,
Ere you can fade, ere you can die,
My Dark Rosaleen!