IRISH SONGS FROM

OLD NEW ENGLAND

A New Compact Disc of Traditional Irish-American Songs from the Flanders Ballad Collection

to be released by Folk-Legacy Records in Summer 2003

Irish Songs from Old New England grew from a chance meeting at the 2000 New England Folk Festival between Nancy-Jean Ballard, Parsons fellow at the Library of Congress and granddaughter of Helen Hartness Flanders, New England's most important folk song collector, and Dan Milner, the Irish-American folk singer, researcher and writer. The introduction was made by Green Linnet Records co-founder Lisa Null and the ensuing discussion soon focused on the wealth of traditional Irish songs which were standard repertoire among traditional singers in all New England states between 1850 and 1950. After listening to archival sound recordings from the Flanders Ballad Collection sent by Nancy-Jean, Dan, who was finishing production work on Folk-Legacy's landmark Irish in America CD, decided to put together an Irish-American song compilation utilizing the Flanders Collection.

In the beginning, the idea was to make a recording of Flanders source singers. Unfortunately, many of the original field recordings were in a deteriorated condition and making a compilation of important musical items in their original state not possible. In the end, it was decided to re-record a representative selection featuring at least one Irish-American item from each Northeastern state.

Helen Hartness Flanders had desired not only to collect New England folk songs but also to reintroduce them. Therefore, the decision was appropriate. Dan Milner first listened to hours of source tapes in search of fine and interesting songs. He then contacted an impressive group of modern-day ballad singers - most close friends - with links to Ireland and/or the Northeast, described the project and sent each a copy of specific song he had selected. All agreed to record the songs anew. Folk-Legacy enthusiastically embraced the project.

The singers are... Gordon Bok, Martin Carthy, Bob Conroy, Len Graham, Frank Harte, Louis Killen, Jim McFarland, Bonnie Milner, Deirdre Murtha, Robbie O'Connell, Caroline & Sandy Paton, Ian Robb and Dan Milner.

Notes to the recording...

INTRODUCTION

From the start, New England was an inhospitable place for the Irish. Immigrants who came to Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont learned quickly that they were in for a hard existence of hostility and discrimination. Puritan Yankees reveled in the American way-of-life they had fashioned far from the strife that had consumed their forbearers. They distrusted anyone foreign and they wished to stay clear.

The Irish of early Massachusetts were a scattering of soldiers, indentured servants and transported prisoners. A small Irish merchant class grew with time and the colony’s first St. Patrick’s Day celebration took place in 1737 with the founding of the Boston Irish Charitable Society. Still, Catholicism could not be practiced lawfully in Massachusetts until 1779 and, 75 years later, Dorchester’s first Catholic church was burned to the ground by the aptly named Know-Nothings. The vast majority of Great Famine (1845-1852) escapees who landed in Boston came with nothing and, without funds to engage in farming or trading, were unable to participate in the principal pursuits they had followed in Ireland. In overwhelming preponderance, their employment had to be the work no one else wanted: laboring and service jobs. Struggling on, most gained a foothold and succeeded… some fabulously.

But the scene in Boston was only part of the New England panorama. In 1719, Ulster-Presbyterians settled the town of Londonderry, New Hampshire and, reputedly, cultivated the potato in North America for the first time. Rhode Island’s early Irish settlers were mainly Protestants too with Catholics arriving in significant numbers for the construction of Fort Adams at Newport starting in 1824. Many of Maine’s Irish are the descendants of “two boaters,” immigrants who came first to Atlantic Canada because fares were generally much cheaper to British North America than to the United States. Matthew Lyon, a native of Co. Wicklow who had started his life in America as an indentured servant in Connecticut, fought with the Green Mountain Boys during the Revolution and served Vermont in Congress from 1796 to 1800. Large numbers of Irish first entered Connecticut to dig the 80-mile long Farmington Canal in the 1820s.

Throughout the 19^th Century, waves of Catholic Irishmen supplied much of the sweat and sinew to build the factories of New England and its railways, roads, public buildings and housing. During the Civil War, thousands upon thousands enlisted while others took the places of Yankees who had already left for battle; many New Englanders, new and old, never returned. As America raced towards the 20^th Century, daughters of laborers and servants became nurses and teachers and many of New England’s Irish Catholic families ascended into the middle class. The eminent historian Kerby Miller writes that, as Southern and Eastern European immigrants began pouring into New England, Boston’s Brahmins began to recruit the Irish as “honorary Anglo-Saxons.”

In 1930, when Helen Hartness Flanders first set out from her Springfield, Vermont home to collect folk songs, she was in search of the English and Scottish popular ballads as defined by the Harvard scholar Francis James Child. By the time the fieldwork was concluded 30 years later, she and her collaborators – George Brown, Elizabeth Flanders Ballard and Marguerite Olney – had broadened that mission greatly and had amassed some 4500 musical items. Many of the songs were of Irish origin or of Irish-American making.

The Flanders field collecting came at a critical time. Those who contributed songs were the last generation to sing the ballads of an early Irish-American song tradition that was being broken by radio, the phonograph and other modern inventions. The singers were mainly older rural dwellers and, interestingly, they were not exclusively of Irish background. Just as the Irish themselves assimilated, their ballads became Irish-American songs. Americans of French-Canadian stock like Eugene Neddeau and Paul Lorette sang “In the Town of Donegal” and “Erin-Go-Bragh” and Yankee singers with names like Abe Washburn and Sidney Luther sang “The Irish Patriot” and “Bold Kelly.” Many of the male informants had worked in the lumber camps of New England and Canada where they felled trees and hauled logs alongside Famine immigrants and where the convention was to learn a ballad exactly as you heard it – brogue and all, often speaking the last few words.

Helen Hartness Flanders not only wanted to collect and to preserve ballads but to re-popularize them as well. She wrote articles for New England newspapers, gave lectures incorporating performances by her informants, published nine books containing songs from the collection and established an archive at Middlebury College in Vermont. Her great work preserved a vast legacy for New Englanders, for the Irish People and for lovers of traditional song everywhere. In Helen Hartness Flanders’ footsteps, this recording is made with the hope of re-introducing these classic Irish-American ballads into today’s living folk song repertoire.

CORK HARBOR (Laws K6)

This rare ballad comes from the repertoire of Charles Finnemore who contributed 90 songs to the Flanders Ballad Collection.Mr. Fennimore lived most of his life in Bridgewater, Maine but he was born in Clearview, Ontario at the southern end of Georgian Bay and he came to the U.S. in 1870 at the age of 10. He sang at Mrs. Flanders’ lectures at the Museum of Natural History in New York and at the Library of Congress. Deirdre Murtha, Dan & Bonnie Milner and Bob Conroy, maritime singers at South Street Seaport Museum, sing Cork Harbor here.

YOUNG MATHYLAND

This love story appeared on 19th Century Irish ballad sheets. According to Robin Morton, it found renewed popularity in Ireland after Co. Fermanagh singer Tommy McDermott won a 1965 All-Ireland ballad competition with it. The FBC source singer was Lena Bourne Fish (1873 – 1945) of East Jaffrey, New Hampshire. Mrs. Fish had a vast store of songs, many Irish. Renowned for his rich baritone, Gordon Bok is an institution in his home state of Maine and is one of America’s best-loved folk singers.

THE MAID OF LOGGIN’S GREEN

Better known as The Maid of Sweet Gurteen, this ballad appears in two of Ireland’s great folk song collections: Colm O Lochlainn’s Irish Street Ballads and Sam Henry’s Songs of the People. Jack McNally, a fine singer from Stacyville, Maine, recorded this and 80 other songs for the FBC. Singing beautifully here is Jim McFarland, one of the very finest exponents of Ireland’s Northern singing style. Born in Derry, Jim is a folk song collector and is an organizer of the greatly respected Goilin Singers Club in Dublin.

ERIN’S GREEN SHORE (Laws Q27)

Most songs on this recording were first printed on old broadside ballad sheets which were typically sold at markets, fairs, sporting events and on busy city thoroughfares, usually by street singers. Erin’s Green Shore was written about 1830. Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847), M.P. and Lord Mayor of Dublin, called The Liberator, figures in scores of Irish come-all-yes. He was born into a wealthy Co. Kerry family and was educated in France because, as a Catholic, he was barred from university in Ireland and Britain. O’Connell championed ideas such as universal suffrage and home rule and was responsible for the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829.Seven FBC informants contributed Erin’s Green Shore. This lovely version comes from William Webster of Wakefield, Rhode Island. Mr. Webster, who was also a fiddler, learned many of his songs from his father and grandfather. Banjo virtuoso Bob Conroy, who sings here, spent much of his youth on Plum Island in Massachusetts.

THE DARK-EYED SAILOR (Laws N35)

Michael Barden – one of eight FBC informants to record The Dark-Eyed Sailor – was born in Ste-Agathe, Quebec, a town with many Irish inhabitants. As a young man, he crossed the border to New Hampshire, where he learned carpentry, and then went on to Boston, where he was employed at the Sheraton Hotel. Michael Barden’s family was from Ulster and the Barden home on Mt. Vernon Street in Dorchester, Massachusetts was a well known “ceilidhing house,” or gathering place for singing and dancing. Bonnie Milner’s rendition of this song follows Mr. Barden’s very poignant delivery. Bonnie was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. She is a founder/member of the highly acclaimed all-woman singing group The Johnson Girls.

THE TANYARD SIDE

Not to be confused with Down by the Tanyard Side, this song is more commonly known as The Irish Girl or I Wish I Was in Manchester. The FBC singer was Maynard Reynolds of Pittsburg, New Hampshire who also contributed The Blood of Kelly and By the Shannon Side. Robbie O’Connell, a Co. Waterford native resident in Massachusetts many years, is America’s most popular Irish folk singer and a member of the famous Clancy singing family.

JAMES DERRY (Child 95)

This old ballad is usually known as The Streets of Derry or Derry Gaol. Elmer George (1877-1951) of North Montpelier, Vermont was of English stock and he learned his Irish songs from Irish lumbermen, this one from a man named Dennis McCrory. Mr. George was a fiddler and a dance caller as well as a singer. He worked in the woods as a youth and later owned a sawmill. Deirdre Murtha, who sings here, is a gifted music teacher from Niantic, Connecticut who grew up in a deeply Irish-American setting. She too is a member of The Johnson Girls.

LOVELY WILLIE (Laws M35)

There is a Belfast version of Lovely Willie in Irish Street Ballads and a Bushmills, Co. Antrim text in Songs of the People. Oscar DeGreenia, the FBC source singer, was a farm hand in West Cornwall, Connecticut, just a few miles from the home of Sandy Paton whose fine, heartfelt rendition appears here.

THE PEELERS OF BALLINAMORE

Far from Times Square, the Adirondack Mountain region of New York State has a lifestyle similar to Vermont, which lies just across Lake Champlain. J.J. Downs lived in West Peru, New York. Helen Hartness Flanders collected three songs from him including The Peelers of Ballinamore, which he learned from an uncle born in Ireland. Scornful of police grafters, it is a rare 19^th Century comedic piece by folk poet Thomas Harvey. Ballinamore, Co. Leitrim is a town of 1000 on the Shannon-Erne Waterway. A toper is a tippler and Tim Daly, who earned his drink “by cheerfully singing the praises of Erin,” was, of course, a professional ballad singer. Len Graham, who sings now, was a founder of the group Skylark. He has received many honors during his career including the Sean O'Boyle Cultural Traditions Award in 1993 and the TG4 Irish television award for Traditional Singer of the Year in 2002.

BARNEY McGEE

Vaudeville troupes toured throughout New England and brought city songs to people far from Boston, Hartford and New York. McNally’s Row of Flats, Tim Finnegan’s Wake and Barney McGee are just three stage songs that found their way into the FBC. Lena Bourne Fish, a quilt maker and mother of eight, contributed more songs to the FBC than any other singer. She was a song collector in her own right, copying lyrics into notebooks and singing with the aid of the texts. Caroline Paton sings here accompanied with concertina by David Paton. Caroline and her husband, Sandy, proprietors of Folk-Legacy Records, probably have done more to aid folk music in New England than anyone since Helen Hartness Flanders.

NAPOLEON’S DEFEAT (Laws J4)

In this classic example of folk adaptation, Northeast lumbermen purposefully whittled down an 18-verse piece of British military jingoism, transforming it into an Irish-American ballad. None of the basic facts are lost but gone are references to a host of European nobles including the Prince of Brunswick, the Duke of Wellington and the Marquis of Angelsey. Sir William Ponceby remains only because he led the famed Enniskillen Dragoons at the Battle of Waterloo. Likewise missing is a reference to “French dogs” found in the original broadside. French-Canadian loggers were plentiful in New England forests and denigrating words were neither sociable nor prudent. An architect by profession and the dean of Dublin singers, the great Frank Harte made a few alterations himself when he recorded this ballad originally sung by Hanford Hayes of Stacyville, Maine. Mr. Hayes was a woodsman, a foreman of the log drive on the East Branch of the Penobscot River in Maine. At the time Mrs. Flanders met him, he was elderly but still a great ballad singer. He lived alone, trapped bears for bounty and made axe handles.

McCORMICK & KELLY

This local comic song is also a jab at McCormick and Kelly. It’s filled with exaggeration. The 1825 fire along the Miramichi River in New Brunswick, for example, killed hundreds and remains as one of Canada’s greatest natural disasters. Ellsworth, on the Maine coast, is a town once renowned both for lumbering and shipbuilding. This is another of Charles Finnemore’s songs and he sang it to the melody of Erin Go Bragh. Singing now is Dan Milner, who was partly raised in Ireland, England, Canada and the USA. Dan conceived and produced this recording. He is a writer, a retired airline executive and a ranger at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum. Bob Conroy plays guitar and Brian Conway the fiddle.

THE CONSTANT FARMER’S SON (Laws M33)

Sam Henry, the Irish folk song collector who corresponded extensively with Helen Hartness Flanders, included a text of The Constant Farmer’s Son in his weekly newspaper column in 1939 calling it a “universal favorite.” The Flanders singer was Annie Syphers of Monticello, Maine. Singing now is Louis Killen who was born in Gateshead, Co. Durham, England of Irish parentage. Lou is universally regarded as a ballad singer of the highest stature. He lived for many years in Maine and Massachusetts and sang for seven years with The Clancy Brothers.

BOLD McCARTHY (Laws K26)

Sailors often worked at logging during the winter, hauling their maritime ballads to the lumber camps, as happened here. The ports of Liverpool and New York were tightly tied together from the first voyage of the Black Ball Line in 1818 until after World War I. During that 100-year period, many poor Irish tried to stow away to New York but many, many more paid their passage. James Rattery, who contributed Bold McCarthy to the FBC, lived in Walpole, New Hampshire on the Connecticut River. Martin Carthy MBE, whose forebearers were McCarthys from Ballybunnion, Co. Kerry, has been one of Britain’s foremost solo singers for four decades. His group credits include Steeleye Span, Waterson:Carthy, Brass Monkey and The Watersons.

ADIEU TO OLD IRELAND (Laws L15)

This ballad appeared frequently on broadsides as The Irish Transport, usually in a Co. Limerick setting.Sadie Syphers Harvey, the FBC informant, lived in Houlton, Maine, a town near the New Brunswick border known for potatoes and lumber. Irish involvement in the lumber industry made for a hearty singing tradition in logging camps. William Main Doerflinger, author-compiler of Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman, wrote about it this way: “Irishmen and their traditional music exerted a strong influence on lumber-woods balladry… After supper, if they weren’t too worn out, and every Sunday, the men sat along the deacon seat… Someone would have a fiddle to accompany the dancing of jigs, hornpipes, and ‘breakdowns.’ And there was usually singing – mostly by individuals rather than the group… singing was so welcome that many men built up big repertoires of lumber-woods ballads and of other folk songs… ‘I could entertain the boys all evening till lights out at nine,’ one shantyboy told me, ‘and not repeat myself once.’ That was typical.” Bonnie, Dan and Deirdre sing here.

THE HEIGHTS OF ALMA (Laws J10)

The Crimean War (1854 – 1856) was fought at a time when nearly 40% of the British Army was Irish, many Great Famine escapees. The first Victoria Cross ever awarded a soldier went to Roscommon-born Sergeant Luke O’Connor for his bravery at the Alma on September 20, 1854. Belfast has an Alma Street, Derry an Alma Square and Dublin, of course, a Raglan Road. The source singer, William Merritt of Ludlow, Maine, also recorded The Orange Alphabet and Shannon’s Lofty Mountain for the FBC. Resident in Ottawa for many years, the splendid singer Ian Robb of Finest Kind is the first member of his family ever born outside Scotland. Within this brilliant arrangement, Ian (concertina) and Greg Brown (accordion and fiddle) weave the Irish march The King of Laois.

DEDICATION, THANKS AND CREDITS

This recording is dedicated to the traditional singers who freely donated their treasured songs to the Flanders Ballad Collection and to the collectors who traveled the byways of New England seeking folk songs of the past to preserve them for the future. Irish Songs from Old New England simply could not have been made without the enthusiastic help of Nancy-Jean Ballard, granddaughter of Helen Hartness Flanders. My sincere thanks and deep appreciation go to the singers and musicians on this recording; clearly, they stamped each of these exceptional songs with their fine art. Thanks also to Jerry McBride of Middlebury College Music Library, repository the Flanders Ballad Collection and to the staff of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, where duplicate copies of the field recordings are located. I am indebted to Jim Gallagher, Jimmy McBride, John Moulden and Tom Munnelly for their kind help. Recorded in the United States, Ireland, England and Canada in 2002 and 2003 by Eric Kilburn, Olly Knight, Paddy J. McLaughlin, David Paton, Jonathan Pickow, Orrin Star, James Stephens and Jason Varley. Produced by Dan Milner. Mastered by Orrin Star. Front cover: oil painting by Ruth Conroy (1908 – 1977), courtesy Bob Conroy. Album designed by Dan Lyman of dgl Solutions and Dan Milner. All songs traditional or anonymous, arranged by the performers. Copyright C P Dan Milner, 2003. For further information, e-mail: folkmusic@prodigy.net

Dan Milner