E:\Irish music\A4 Irish history in song 1 & 2.wpd - Ireland in Schools

There is little political realism in most of these songs, but the sweet mixture of haziness and magiccommonly attributed to Irish poetry is hardly to be found either.Artistic merit - againstStreet ballads, of a political nature or otherwise, have been ignored or dismissed as unworthy ofconsideration by most literary critics. Scholars who study folk songs often despise the more modernbroadsides, or hold them responsible for a decay of oral tradition and a perversion of popular taste.To present the bulk of these texts as poetry would indeed be ludicrous. Their form is usually clumsy inthe extreme, and what is not trivial is all too often incongruous. Elements borrowed from folklore or fromlearned literature are likely to be more or less debased. The poorness of these street ballads is in itselfsignificant; it shows to what the Irish people, kept in misery and deprived of their own culture, werereduced in the greater part of the last century. There is something pathetic in the descriptions given bysome travellers of the ragged crowds who swarmed around the street singers and followed them step bystep, eagerly listening to their wretched songs.Artistic merit - forIt is usually admitted that these texts deserve to receive serious consideration as historical or sociologicaldocuments; but have they no other merit?The really unassuming songs have at least virtues of spontaneity and straightforwardness, not easily tobe found at a more intellectual level. They may have the primitive charm of naive painting. Folksimplicity is attractive, as in ‘The Croppy Boy’ for instance, and it can have nobility, as in some stanzasof the ballads on ‘Michael Boylan’, and ‘General Munroe’.When the authors have not been misled by the tendency to imitate sophisticated literature, theiruntutored attempts to put into words their thoughts and feelings, awkward as they appear, are originaland eloquent. Even in a dull and trite piece a few lines can show a vivid image and a fine vigour. And inmany cases the emotional power of the words is greatly enhanced by beautiful melodies.The methods of literary criticism are hardly applicable to such texts, and subtle aesthetic appreciationwould be lost on them. The authors of the best ballads had limited ambitions. Their songs were writtenfor immediate use, not for posterity, and they strived to please virtually unlettered people, not fastidiousamateurs of fine literature. Yet some of them have lived on vigorously among the people; almost a quarterof the texts reproduced in this book are still heard to-day, though often in a different version. For a largepart of the Irish audience, much of their content is perhaps not too clear now, but their impact may stillbe great....Importance of contextWe must remember that, poor as these ballads may seem on paper, a number of them assume unexpecteddimensions when sung by a genuine Irish singer in the right surroundings. A song is more than a text anda melody which can be recorded or printed, examined and criticized. It is the result of a communal stateof mind and it depends on the conjunction of an inspired singer, a receptive audience, and variouscircumstances creating a favourable mood. In Ireland, however, some of these elements seem to defyanalysis.Additional note - folk songs v. political balladsA comparison with the songs circulated as broadsides and sung in the streets in various European countries would probably show that the Irishtexts, on the whole, are not inferior to the others. In some cases they might be notably better, since they are closer to oral tradition, but no suchevaluation is possible until research in the field of European broadside balladry has been carried further. In most countries, folk songs properare better known, but they are not exactly the same thing.Still, a fact which emerges from this study is that the Irish political ballads are not altogether alien to traditional literature, however recent theirorigin and relatively brief their existence. Even when their authorship is untraceable, they were made by individuals, but this must have beenthe case with folk songs too, and they survived on the condition that they had been moulded on an impersonal tradition. Though they were oftenpropagated in printed form they were not always static: they could also be committed to memory or handed down by word of mouth andreshaped by each singer, either to his own taste, or, perhaps unconsciously, to a communal taste expressed through a set of formulae and motifs.There is an interrelationship between oral tradition and popular printed literature, as well as between popular and learned cultures.IiS, Irish history in song 1 & 2, page 16