In the last couple of weeks I’ve read several posts and articles that have lamented the passing of the “blogosphere”, the “enshittification” of social media and the decay of “the internet of ideas”.
It seemed the opportune moment to start a blog.
That’s the “why now”, with only a touch of irony.
The “why” flows from, as Frederick Buechner suggested, “the place where your (my) deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
I love music. It has been, among other things, lifesaving for me. And I love words, I recognize the power of stories to build up and tear down, from the most lyrical poetry to polemic like a primal scream. The “why” comes out of the “who”. I’m vocationally a pastor, a leader of sorts in a community organized around shared beliefs, values, commitments, and practices; someone who agreed, for the sake of something larger than myself, to be set aside, set apart, “othered” in some ways, so that the community could be equipped to do the things that make for wholeness, individually and collectively, materially and spiritually (or at least reach in that direction). And, I’m a musician, a poet, an artist, who sometimes must create, regardless of whether there is an audience. I delight in sharing.
Which brings me to the “what”.
If you’re gonna blog, you need content.
So it’s gonna be songs. At least one, each week, to start with and probably more. With some commentary, maybe a story, maybe some lyrical analysis, or a poem, who knows.
The title was inspired by a post from Joseph Fasano:
I hope this little offering will inspire you in some way, to make each day a song you sing.
Week 1:
The Minstrel Boy
With St. Patrick’s Day fast approaching, this isn’t remarkably creative choice to begin with, but as an introduction, it may be a better place than most.
I’m probably not much more Irish by ethnicity than any other pale-skinned North American that can trace ancestry back and get to the island in five generations. The melting pot gets to melting pretty quickly, and I’m probably at least as much German (Austrian). But my mother didn’t like the nickname that came with my dad’s family’s tradition for the first son, and so, as a compromise, they landed on the Gaelic version.
Now, this was well before the days when you could find an Ian or a Liam in many Midwestern kindergartens and Sean was just as likely to be spelled Shaun or Shawn.
Without revealing too much, let’s just say that my name was a real character-builder, and pretty much shouts “Irish” to the world.
When I was very young, I chanced to see a ¼-size violin in a music store window, and delighted by the idea that there were instruments made for people my size, I expressed interest to my mother. My uncle and great-uncle on her side of the family had both played the violin and this happened to be an emotionally freighted part of her life. Suffice to say, I began violin lessons at age 6, before Jimmy Carter became president, and have continued making music to this day.
My dad was the one who leaned into the “Irish-ness” of our family history, and having some musical talent, he took up the fiddle himself a few years after I started lessons. I remember playing along with him on a Spring evening, out of a songbook “1001 Gems: The Dance Music of Ireland” by O’Neill, racing our way ever faster through #811, “The Rights of Man” until we reached a speed where the muscle memory in our fingers gave out and we lowered our bows, at once laughing and out of breath.
We were, in some ways, solidly Irish-American heirs of the Irish diaspora, rooting for Union while appalled by the violence in Belfast and on the border, and the language of “The Minstrel Boy” and other songs from Tommy Makem and the Clancys stood in tension with the less overtly political tunes from The Irish Rovers. As a teenager, I remember reading “Paddy’s Lament, Ireland 1846-1847: Prelude to Hatred” (www.goodreads.com/...) and the songs of rebellion took on new energy and urgency as I was working through who and how I wanted to be in the world.
“The Minstrel Boy” became part of the soundtrack, especially of the month of March, not just on cassettes and eventually CD’s, and iTunes playlists, but in the muscle memory of my fingers, a melody that I can recall at a moment on the violin, pick out with relative ease on the guitar, and lyrics that are always available without much more than a drawn out “The...”
Irish poet Thomas Moore penned the words in the early 1800’s, well before the famine, but solidly located in a period of ongoing upheaval, with the memory of Cornwallis’ defeat of the French and the uprisings in County Wexford and County Mayo just fifteen or so years before. Scholars are unsure where he got the tune.
The first verse sets the mood:
The minstrel boy to the war is gone,
in the ranks of death you will find him.
His father’s sword he has girded on,
and his wild harp slung behind him.
“Land of Song”, says the warrior bard,
“though all the world betrays thee,”
“one sword, at least, Thy rights shall guard,
one faithful harp shall praise Thee.”
“The ranks of death” is certainly a piece of foreshadowing, but the real weight in the opening lines might be “his father’s sword”. Especially considering the history of conflict and trauma present to this day in Ireland, the way that colonialism is expressly for the sake of exploitation of people and resources, and the way in which the impacts of that oppression can be generational, even epigenetic, and in each generation, resistance rises up. Of course his father had a sword. In some ways, the line tells us, “here we go again...”
The second part of the first verse reflects that deep and abiding love of Ireland that the Irish, even in diaspora, have somehow managed to convey. More than geography, here, instead of the green hills of Tara, our vision is metaphysical, dancing, a “Land of Song” that needs to be defended, that is worthy of praise. But the defenders are few. Still, the minstrel’s faithfulness is not dependent on the popularity of his stance. His cause is righteous, regardless of its strategic likelihood of success. More foreshadowing, both for the song, and for the Irish, as well as history.
Verse two completes the tale:
The minstrel fell but the foeman’s chains
could not keep that proud soul under.
The harp he loved ne’er spoke again
for he tore its c(h)ords asunder.
And said, “no chain shall sully thee,
Thou soul of love and bravery!
Thy songs were made for the pure and free
they shall never sound in slavery.”
Again, we hear history in these lines, but also the spirit of rebellion that endures. We won’t play the songs of our captors, nor will we turn the music that inspired us to fight for freedom into entertainment for our oppressors. I’ll let the reader judge whether Irish musicians have more or less held to that in the years since Moore’s passing in 1852, although U2’s album “War” and Sinead O’Connor’s witness suggest that similar energies persist.
This second verse, to me, has always called to mind the opening words of Psalm 137, one of the Scriptures that many progressive Christians would like to pretend doesn’t exist, combining lament and imprecation in the voice of a people both defeated and exiled. From the Common English Bible:
Alongside Babylon’s streams,
there we sat down,
crying because we remembered Zion.
2 We hung our lyres up
in the trees there
3 because that’s where our captors asked us to sing;
our tormentors requested songs of joy:
“Sing us a song about Zion!” they said.
4 But how could we possibly sing
the Lord’s song on foreign soil?
Moore’s lyrics, of course, take this a step further, the harps aren’t merely hung up, but the strings broken; it’s not just that our hearts are too sad to play, weighed down with grief, it’s that we refuse, actively resisting. For those who know the end of the Psalm, the Bible goes much further in calling for revenge, but one might easily imagine a similar level of rage animating Irish patriots especially following the famine years.
Still, here, in spite of an extensive history of atrocity, music, incarnated, embodied, enfleshed, in the physical materiality of a harp, is described as the “soul of love and bravery”. Against more modern songs of Irish rebellion — “Johnson’s Motor Car”, “My Little Armalite” — Moore’s poetry calls both for resistance and for holding on to the things of a better world in the face of oppression and betrayal. Win or lose, the minstrel boy invites us to resist complicity with the things that we are resisting.
So, breathe.
Whether you’re Irish, or just like green, I wish you a happy St. Patrick’s Day; steer clear of the green beer.
Bonus music:
