Every smallest branch of the human family at one time or another has carved its dreams out of the rock on which it has lived —true and sometimes pain-filled dreams, but still wholly appropriate to their particular bit of earth. Each of these ways of expressing emotion has been the handiwork of generations of unknown poets, musicians and human hearts. Now, we of the jets, the wireless and the atomblast are on the verge of sweeping completely off the globe what unspoiled folklore is left, at least wherever it cannot quickly conform to the success-motivated standards of our urban-conditioned consumer economy.
-Alan Lomax, 1959
It’s a little bit of that.
-Comment on YouTube video: “Luke Kelly Rising of the Moon”, 2017
And a little of that, too.
I’m Jack, a writer, photographer and PhD researcher from Dublin. In my PhD I work on the political uses of Irish folk music in the 1950s and 60s. I’ll be writing about that of course, but a lot more besides. I’m interested in the ways that music moves people. That may sound quite banal; a process that, if you’re anything like me, happens six or seven times a day and outside of your own head means very little. I want to write about what happens next. What do people do when moved by music? Why do so many songs about field work become anti-fascist anthems? Why do decayed social democratic parties still sing the Internationale or Solidarity Forever at the close of day? Why did people start singing Sinn Fein and IRA in between lines of The Fields of Athenry? What power does nostalgia have in shaping the world? I don’t, and probably will never, have the answers to any of these questions, but that absolutely will not stop me writing about them.
("03 Bernard Hoffman: Alan Lomax & Jerome Weisner" by maxmuchedumbre is marked with CC0 1.0)
My focus is usually but not exclusively on the left. Work songs, radical songs, rebel songs and socialist anthems are my bread and butter. Or bread and roses, if you prefer. Greek anti-fascist anthems and the anti-Mafia songs of Southern Italy. Songs of Diggers and peasants and populists. Free Soil Republicans and Irish Republicans. Anarchists and Anarcho-syndicalists. Popular Fronts and New Deals and Internationals 1-4. Tunes of Lefts Old and New and newer still. I want to examine a little bit of their creation, and what they mean now, years, decades or even centuries later. I’ll talk about other stuff too: Dublin’s ephemeral joys; the unbearable pathos of YouTube comment sections; the continuing appeal of Reeling in the Years; lies people tell about Limerick and of course, what Taylor Swift has to do with the English Civil War. I know, I know, the last thing the world needs is another “Is Taylor Swift the Gerrard Winstanley of Our Age?” hot take, but I can’t help myself. If that sounds good to you, or even if it sounds terrible, go ahead and subscribe. For now, I’ll try to write at least one issue a month, though it may occasionally be more than that.
No matter what I write, I’ll try my best to keep some link to the music. Because that’s the link that my head makes, and maybe yours does too. There is something in the way that music arcs in the mind, the way it pulls meaning out of memory and shapes it into a thing very different. There is something too, in the way that political music takes the material of the past and makes it into a vision of the future. There is something in the way that music unites, and dissolves the differences in a room or a crowd into harmony. In a time of dislocation and despair, there is still some strange power there. There is something.
'Tis the rising of the moon, 'tis the rising of the moon
And hoorah me boys for freedom 'tis the rising of the moon
(Dublin, 2017, Jack Sheehan)