Occasionally, I feel the need to tug on the ends of the song warp and weft, and see where it leads. And I find that when something catches my ear, my brain, AND my heart… I HAVE to listen.

I’ve been so stretched thin and I didn’t think I had any threads left to tug into weaving a story, but today I found my mind wandering down a what-if rabbit hole. What if this great long history of oral tradition, that’s traveled across oceans, retains some unexpected fibers still. Ah, I see that it does. So when I heard the McKeaney sisters singing an American song… I knew there was something there.

Last year, I visited the Innishowen traditional singers conference in Ballyliffin, Donegal and found some stylistic patterns that show up across music depending on who’s sharing them, and where they learned the song from. I as an American am quite familiar with a 2/4 blues rhythm, in a 4/4 song. but I was in Ireland… and the pulse for tunes, AND songs, is ⅓. And the ladies started singing an American song … into a room of people who are used to both listening and learning by ear, including from American singers, and their usual treatments of songs from within the irish tradition. So when they started singing “Hard Times, hard times, come again no more…”at a luncheon with 180 other people… we got an earful of the combined pulse of a song, in real time, showcasing where the singers had learned it from. Half the room, emphasizing the 2, and half the room launching in on the 1. It got me thinking. What is the nature of changes that happen to music depending on where you learned them, and what is the sound of the Western US.

We know that archaic appalachian versions of the song, Barbara Allen survived in W. Virginia and Kentucky, and we know that Scottish Song collectors of the early 19th century in both the US and in ireland and England have nearly identical versions, Collected by folklorists like, Alan Lomax and James Francis Child. And songs like, Come All Ye fair and Tender Ladies, survived, in local color on both sides of the pond. Over time, and throughout the regions, the songs changed form, they found new words to add to the weight of the story, and translate it to local goings on, but in new form, with lyrics that tell a different version of the same story of heartbreak, in Silver Dagger as well.

 And so I let my mind wander down, what ifs of the remnants of songs that traveled over the oceans to further shores more remote. And I thought of how specific localities change the tone, and often the color of the details of these songs and stories. Some travelled overland west over mountains, or deserts to the Left coast where there was whaling and other fishing traditions and and logging. And the songs traveled with them.

I noticed when I was little, and my father’s mom sang a song she learned as a child, called “Einini”… go to sleep beside the wall which is a lullaby in the irish language. Her first memories of it from her parents, in a tiny village in the north, in Donegal. Einini, Codailigi, codailigi. And one day my mother heard me humming it, said it was the same melody as this old cowboy song she’d heard, “Birdy nini”, collected from cowboys in the 19th century settling in Southern California. The words she recalled were a direct English translation with remnants of the Irish language still in it. The song was a macaronic amalgamation of English and Irish, called, “Navajo” by someone who didn’t know. It got me thinking, when people traveled across paths to the great fortunes of foreign shores that awaitedon the Pacific coast, Gold, Fish, spices, exotic fruits, and music comingled. And remnants of culture, language and proclivities ( eg. for traditional song) remained. And I couldn’t let it rest. There must be threads I haven’t tugged on elsewhere, and i wanted to know about them.

So I went looking at the irish Traditional Music Archives in Dublin, Ireland. Seeking out any songs collected from California, Washington, and anywhere west of the Rockies with a sembrlance of the irish language in them. A word here or there would suffice for my curiosity. But I wanted to know what things had survived, the colonial push to remove the Irish language from public discourse, like in Ireland, and was roundly told that the post WWI anticommunist goal of homoginazation, had thoroughly eradicated the teaching of “Irishness” or any other European cultural markers in the interests of assimilation.

Children were given an expectation of blue-jeans and coca Cola and told to become a new identity instead, White American. And after  WWII, it met McCarthyism and the Red Scare. And many indigenous language speakers who’d emigrated, only taught or spoke English. Parents were punished here as well as in Ireland, for teaching Irish language, dance, and music, and others languages as well. Performing racial identity in opposition to others became the identity, and much of the language and cultural practices went underground. But like any indigenous culture in the face of genocide, pockets survive because they must. irish Speakers emigrated to every major city that would have them, and some, specially planted. Think of the major cities where agiant St Patrick’s day presence is found, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, New York… and Springfield Illinois?

I knew that I had to look to the elders… my friends grandparents, and listen to their stories recalling weird old things they brought with them from home, here on the left coast. Superstitions, anyone? I went looking for old song practices that matched with my recollection of childhood and discovered that a number of immigrants/ landed in Butte and Helena Montana… where the Practice of Caoineadh (keening) survived in pockets of immigrant communities, and wakes are still held in a way to honor community dead over several days in ritual collective mourning up through the 1960s, when cold war anti-foreign identity became most staunchly defended.  So if a practice that had largely died out in Ireland up to the war for independence in the 19 teens thanks to the Catholic Church’s discomfort at old Pagan pre-christian mourning rituals, it stands to reason the language, cultural expression and music have survived in small forms as passed orally from generation to generation and been affected by the local communities that carry them today.

And then I found an article outlining how Scottish Gaelic songs had survived, and the Oral song traditions of song transmission had survived up into the 1930s and 40s,with fishing villages on the left coast. And they’re recorded here.
So I want to know, if someone thought to collect something from an adjacent culture, with similarities and some shared intelligibility of language, above, and I heard about a “cowboy song collected from the Navajo”… what else don’t we know yet about hunting for and then finding and carefully connecting threads of our cultural past. I want to know if the threads I feel in my bones, of songs carried across the water, across generations, across time, and changed by the singers still singing them, still have the language alive in them. I want to know, how have the singers still singing the songs, touched and carried them, and made their collection, uniquely, left coast.