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I've been trying to post this video, but have been encountering some problems, so you'll need go to Youtube to view it. It's a performance of the beautiful song "Arthur McBride," masterfully played and lyrically sung by Paul Brady in a 1977 live performance.
It's a strange irony that the most beautiful Irish songs are also often the most explicitly, even violently, political ones, including this one, about the failed 1798 uprising (also the subject of the wonderful historical novel The Year of the French by Thomas Flanagan, Caitlin's dad).
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5 comments:
Dude! The Year of the French was one brilliant ----in' book, Pentimento. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who read it.
What a beautiful song. There's a brilliant Irish song called "By The Hush" sung by a Scottish singer named Andy Stewart about an Irish immigrant being drafted "to go and fight for Lincoln" that will stir you.
Yeah, it's a great book, Fallen! He wrote two others that are meant to be the second and third in a sort of Irish trilogy, but I haven't gotten to them yet. John Moore, the scion of the noble family who becomes a United Irishman in Year of the French, was the real-life grandfather of one of the subjects of my dissertation, the novelist George Moore . . . long story, that.
I will check out "By the Hush." There's also the haunting "Paddy's Lament," on the same topic, which was recorded by Mary Black - there
s a stirring rendition here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq4BPhyj3BU
Mary Black song is the same - I just had heard it under a different title. Beautiful.
Beauty often comes out of violence, as the Irish well know.
Hmmm. Is that really beauty, though? Can you expand on that, RB?
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