Skibbereen: A Song History
Skibbereen, a workhouse town, was among the places hit hardest by the Great Famine, and its heritage centre calls it the "ground zero" of the Great Hunger; in January 1847 newspapers described people in its poorer lanes dying of hunger and fever, some left unburied for days because their families could not pay for a coffin.[1] The song takes the form of a conversation in which a son asks his father why he left a place he still speaks of so fondly, and the father names the potato blight, eviction by his landlord and his part in the 1848 rising, after which the son swears to avenge him.[2]
Robert Charles Dudley, The Atlantic Telegraph Cable Fleet Assembled at Berehaven (Southwest Coast of Ireland), watercolor over graphite with touches of gouache, 1866. The harbour at Berehaven, on the County Cork coast, in 1866; the watercolor has no connection to the song.
Writing in History Ireland, Dan Milner argues that the song was made in America as an Irish-American Fenian anthem and became a Famine lament only after it was joined to a slow, minor-key melody and taken into Irish tradition.[3] Milner suggests its first appearance in print may be in a Boston songbook, The Wearing of the Green (1869), and an 1873 New York songster names Patrick Carpenter, a Skibbereen man who emigrated and wrote verse for the Boston Pilot and the New York Irish World in the 1870s.[3][4] Mainly Norfolk also gives the Carpenter attribution as it appears in The Irish Singers' Own Song Book (Boston, 1880).[5] The heritage centre notes an older local belief that Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa wrote it, and rejects it.[4] A Glasgow ballad sheet of December 1875 printed it without an author, and Herbert Hughes published it in 1915, noting that he had found it in County Tyrone.[3]
The tenor George O'Brien recorded it for Victor on December 3, 1926.[6] Edith Fowke recorded O. J. Abbott singing it for his 1961 Folkways album Irish and British Songs From the Ottawa Valley, and later singers include Joe Heaney, who was taped singing it in 1964, and Frank Harte, who put it on his 2004 album The Hungry Voice.[7][5] Janene Millen and Shawn McCurdy set it in DAD tuning for From Ditties To Dirges, a mountain dulcimer book of ballads, laments, lullabies and other songs, mostly from the British Isles, that comes with MP3 demo tracks.[8]
Sources
- Skibbereen Heritage Centre: "Windmill Hill/The Rock – The Great Famine".
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Skibbereen".
- History Ireland: "'Old Skibbereen': Fenian anthem or Famine lament?".
- Skibbereen Heritage Centre: "'Dear Old Skibbereen'".
- Mainly Norfolk: "Skibbereen".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor 79065".
- Mainly Norfolk: "O.J. Abbott: Irish and British Songs From the Ottawa Valley".
- Janene Millen And Shawn McCurdy: "From Ditties To Dirges".
- Image: Robert Charles Dudley, The Atlantic Telegraph Cable Fleet Assembled at Berehaven (Southwest Coast of Ireland), watercolor over graphite with touches of gouache, 1866. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.