It’s St. Patrick’s Day this week. This version is not the version I’m most familiar with. Apparently, the small Irish band which came to town some years ago and encouraged me to buy their CD sang an ancient version of this very old song. The gist is the same. A young man last sees his bride-to-be walking through the fair. Sometime afterwards, she dies, and in the last verse, her ghost visits him at night to say her final words to him again.
That’s the way Irish love songs go. One lover dies; another one is rejected; or another couple is opposed by their family or society or circumstances from living happily ever after. Moral: Don’t love an Irish person.
For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad.
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.
(G. K. Chesterton, “The Ballad of the White Horse.”)
Or, as someone else wrote (in reference to James Joyce and others):
For the young Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that drive me mad.
For half their lines need footnotes,
And all their rhymes are bad.
Ha! I like the latter one, and I was thinking of the Chesterton quote, though I didn’t remember who said it.
I don’t think its a peculiarity of Irish Folk songs.
Its just folk songs.
That’s how a folk song goes. At the end of it the protagonist is either heartbroken, pregnant (and heartbroken), imprisoned, dead or waiting to die.
The only exception being if the protagonist is drunk at the end of the song (see Wild Rover, Come Landlord Fill The Flowing Bowl and other drinking songs).
And I write this as someone who passionately loves Irish, English, and American Folk Music, which makes up a good 1/3 – 1/2 of my small but eclectic music collection…
I’ll buy that, but I have little familiarity with folk music outside the Celtic-Gaelic variety.
Up in this neck of the woods we will be celebrating St. Urho day this week. I wish I had time to drive down to the great statue in Menahga to again view the great pitchfork shaking the grasshoppers out of Finland. But I don’t get that far south very often.