The Unquiet Grave

Until this century, life expectancy in Ireland was short, very short, less than forty years for most people.
If you lived to be fifty you were considered a rarity and if you made it to sixty or seventy or eighty, you were an elder, a revered personage, a respected sage, for you had seen two, or three, or four generations come and go. Not many people could say that.

Can you imagine how hard life was n the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th century here in Ireland? Most people lived from hand to mouth, subsisting on too-small farms, that were over-worked and hopelessly inadequate to amply feed the too-big families of the poor tenant farmers who made up the largest proportion of the people in Ireland. Life was uncertain. 
Aside from being poor, they were governed in the main by antagonistic or at best unsympathetic Protestant and Presbyterian English settlers, who themselves, though they were better off, also had a relatively short life expectancy. War, famine, disease and accidents were the more likely cause of death for most people. For women, child-birth was one of the biggest killers. Life was cheap, hard and unfair. Death did not discriminate, rich and poor died at an astonishing rate.

Men especially, died young. They worked outside, in all elements, in poor clothing and with little food or shelter. Widows did not fare well without their men to provide for them. Life was hard. Death, and especially an early or unexpected death was a fact of life. The dead, both rich and poor, were mourned by their loved ones, buried quickly, and but for a few, quickly forgotten.

Very few left any kind of records, and almost no one had a permanent grave marker. If you were memorialised at all it was probably in song or story. That job fell to the local, or sometimes itinerant seanachai, or story-teller. Those ancient bards were revered and respected and gained the valuable patronage of the Irish and indeed the Norman upper class, allowing them to survive and thrive in that society. By the 18th century, with the demise of the Irish ruling class, the bards and shanachies were thrown on the generosity of the less well-off farming classes.

On my walking tours of Galway ( www.galwaywalks.com ) I tell my visitors about the intrinsic value of the story-teller or ‘shanachie’ in Irish culture. The shanachie was a revered and respected individual, poor no doubt, but hearkening back to the minstrels who lived with the ancient Irish nobility and recorded their histories. The older people, men and women, were a store of learned experience and handed down traditions that younger people could access, verbally when you were alive, because you had witnessed events and were able to recount them first-hand or from memory. Unfortunately, most stories died when you died, but if we were lucky, your stories, your knowledge, your wisdom was carried to the next generation by the shanachai.

Shanachies were skilled at recounting a good tale, especially when gathered around the hearth in the long winter nights. Family histories and legends were passed down from generation to generation in this way, from father to son, mother to daughter, but in ear-shot of the elders, who would act as editors of the tales, correcting, embellishing, reinforcing the stories before they themselves passed away.

So too it was with ballad singers and poets. The wandering musicians who went from village to village sang their songs, recounted stories, collected new stories, a latter-day Reuters, spreading the news of the day, but 'singing for their supper' too. They relied on local hospitality for their lodging and food, because no one had money to pay for their services and the ‘Big Houses of the Irish nobility were long gone and the patrons long dead or banished overseas as 'The Wild Geese'. The old Irish ascendancy had been replaced by ‘Planters’ who wouldn't have understood the language, had no interest in the ‘old Irish tales’ and even less interest in being a patron of a mendicant minstrel.

This reliance on travelling minstrels to collect and disseminate news and stories became even more important during the Penal Laws, and right up until the Famine, during which period the Irish language, religion, education and culture were suppressed. Literacy rates among all classes of Catholics plummeted. By the mid 18th century very few Irish speakers could write or read and their stories, their histories, their customs and folk-tales were lost as the generations passed away.

Most of the Irish population were tenant farmers, mainly illiterate, unable to read the papers of the day, and now heavily relied on itinerant poets musicians for entertainment and for news. The suppression of the Irish language was a major cause of this cultural loss. The upside is that despite their hardship and changed circumstances, the Irish kept the tradition of the shanachai and bard alive, as well as the music, the stories, the faith. Those fragile stories survived in the poems and songs, but only barely.

After the Great Hunger however, from 1842 on, emigration, evictions and famine finally broke the back of millennia of Irish tradition and culture. There was a flight to the towns and rural traditions were quickly forgotten. So too were the thousands of songs and stories that were the stock-in-trade of the shanachai. Very little of our history and cultural lore had been written down, much was lost forever as these seanachai and bards died.

Fortunately, some of the stories and songs and poems were collected and written down, much of it by Anglo-Irish academics during the late 19th and early 20th century while there was still some folk memories of the great stories and indeed while some of the itinerant story-tellers still lived. Lady Gregory was one such collector. Her work amongst the tenant farmers rescued countless stories from permanent loss. There were many others around Ireland doing similar work, many of them women. We have through them, some glimpse of the imagination, tales, ballads and poems of these often under-estimated poets, musicians and shanachies, the druids of a bye-gone era.

Later on in the 20th century, there was a Gaelic Revival and much credit has to be given to the many writers including Padraic Pearse and Douglas Hyde who wrote down many of these stories. Finally, with the invention of the wax disc recorders, and with some foresight, very many ‘Oral Histories’ and ‘Folk-Tales’ were recorded and collected in the 1930’s and 1940’s by the volunteers working for the 'Irish Folklore Commission’ and they have been saved. Of course much more was lost, died with the people and the tumbled cottages, buried forever in a restless grave.

England, like Ireland had also lost touch with its own shanachie and rural traditions. Their stories and songs were lost at an accellerated rate during the 19th century industrialisation and urbanisation of Britain. Unlike Ireland, literacy rates were much higher in Britain and there was a large academic and wealthy class who dedicated themselves to writing down these dying traditions, stories and songs. Collectors like Child, working dilligently up and down the country, dilligently and avidly recorded thousands of songs and stories and these collections now inform our academics and singers on that lost oral history. 

A hundred years or so after the Famine, ‘The Clancy Brothers’ and ‘The Dubliners’ emerged from the cities and entertained us with a new genre of Irish Music. They sang songs we had never heard before and we embraced them, these new brand of minstrels, our own latter-day shanachies mined that treasure trove of collected songs in Irish and British museums and universities and revived these otherwise lost songs. The songs they sang were really the stories and poems of the past, handed down, generation to generation, now put into ballads. they breathed life back into our folklore and the ‘Folk’ movement blossomed. We now called our shanachies 'folk-singers' and the name and genre stuck.

Luke Kelly was one of our best folk-singers. A founding member of The Dubliners, Luke was a sponge, soaking up words and stories anywhere he lived, especially in England in the early sixties. He collected songs and poems like other people collect stamps or rare coins. He collected many of his songs in England where he worked as a younger man.

Luke was the quintessential story-teller, but one with a singing voice that once heard will never be forgotten. The world and Ireland is so lucky to have had such a balladeer. He and his fellow musicians, including Christy Moore and Ewan McColl have saved an entire tranche of Irish and British folk history from oblivion.

Recently I made a little time to research a poem/ballad I’d never heard of, ‘The Unquiet Grave’. This song was alluded to by the widow of Luke Kelly (Luke of the Dubliners, died 32 years ago) in an interview I heard on the radio. Luke apparently sang this song and it was her favourite memory of him, for reasons that will become apparent when you read the poem or listen to the song. This is an ancient poem, one that probably existed in parts, and in other versions for over five hundred years, but the sentiment of loss and of undying love contained in this song or poem is powerful and utterly timeless. It is a true folk-tale.

Enjoy…but be prepared, it is a very moving piece.

“The wind doth blow today, my love,
And a few small drops of rain;
I never had but one true-love,
In cold grave she was lain.

“I’ll do as much for my true-love
As any young man may;
I’ll sit and mourn all at her grave 
For a twelvemonth and a day.”

The twelvemonth and a day being up, 
The dead began to speak: 
“Oh who sits weeping on my grave,
And will not let me sleep?”

” ‘Tis I, my love, sits on your grave, 
And will not let you sleep;
For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,
And that is all I seek.”

“You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips, 
But my breath smells earthy strong;
If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips, 
Your time will not be long.

” ‘Tis down in yonder garden green, 
Love, where we used to walk, 
The finest flower that e’re was seen 
Is withered to a stalk.

“The stalk is withered dry, my love,
So will our hearts decay; 
So make yourself content, my love, 
Till God calls you away.”

‘The Unquiet Grave – or Child Ballad # 78, is a street ballad that was collected by the Harvard scholar, Francis James Child, in his unfinished ten volume collection, ‘The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1892-98)’. Without him, this little story which could have its roots in Ireland, England, Scotland or Wales, may have been lost forever. We do not know where or when Luke Kelly found this ballad, but he did, and it is beautiful. This is his version of a timeless story of tragic true love. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyqBA_Qr3qs

Luke Kelly passed away on the 30th of January 1984.  

Enjoy, Brian.

You can also read my blog on http://www.thenewwildgeese.com 
Photos, John Carlos, Anna King and various others in Public Domain.