The intertwining of American, British, and Irish folk cultures is not something that has yet to be proved. Whether it be illustrated in How I Met Your Mother, with Marshall and Ted's road trip background music, 500 miles, performed by the Scottish band the Proclaimers, or by the fact that you cannot set foot in a Irish pub without hearing some incredibly talented folk singer playing his very personal version of American Pie or of Cocaine blues, Irish, British, American folks echo each other. Folk music transcends the Atlantic, and is a vivid marker of a common history. This is especially the case between Ireland and America.
Indeed, after the Irish famine, waves and waves of Irish immigrants settled in America hoping to find a promised land of their own. This wide emigration, starting in the 1850s, had consequences on the cultural tradition of America. As the Irish took an American identity, their music was to take one too. Geographically, the Appalachian Mountains, where the Irish partly settled, were also the place where American country music originated. The documentary Bringing it all back home - whose title is inspired by the name of Bob Dylan's fifth album - describes the weight of Irish music on what was to become American tradition. Pete Seeger, an American Irish folk singer, sees American folk music as a borrowing of traditional Irish melodies: "I think one reason why the Irish tradition remains so strong is our treasury of magnificent melodies" so the easiest way is to: "Swipe an old melody and put new words" and "this has been be done through all American history, putting new words to old Irish melodies." In git along little dogies, played for the first time by John Lomax, but then reproduced a number of times, we hear the melody of The old man rocking the cradle, performed by John Doherty (from the Northern province of Donegal). The two songs have the same melody, they are both iconic folk songs, only from a song about the holy family in the Irish version, it became a traditional cowboy song when moving to America. Ireland then, is a great deal at the origins of the songs of the "hillbillies."
Things happened as though this musical genre adapted to the context it was brought to. But Irish and American folk music definitely share a common ground. A common ground, and a common grass...
Under the influence
Folk music is a popular genre; originally coming from the rural world, it ought to speak to everybody. The themes it tackles are comprehensive and tell us about the identity and representation of the everyman through the songs of the people. It is the music of every situation: love, work, departure, death... Everything! Folk music is a democratic genre and makes room for things ugly or bad.
And so, stories of drug-taking and alcohol-drinking are at the heart of both Irish and American iconic folk songs. Mostly cocaine for the Americans and Whiskey for the Irish. Pick your side. In Whiskey in the Jar, the Dubliners suggest that even though everything can go wrong - after your lover betrays you, after you are sent to prison - your glass can still be half full, half full of whiskey. Eric Clapton and JJ Cale's Cocaine is the ultimate value, what you are left with in the end because "she don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie". Drugs and spirits also act as a generetor, pure life energy, whiskey thus becomes the life of a man, and makes you rise up from the ground. As central themes in various songs, those substances can appear as blessings from the gods, literally falling from the sky in Reverend Horton Heat's Bales of Cocaine. Both are the "darlings", the love ones, the reason why you shoot your wife sometimes... and thus take a special place in the lyrics of folk singers. The evocation of drugs and booze by the Clancy Brothers, Clapton or the Dubliners is associated with something genuine, deep - manly also. And it cannot but recall the way that the experience of the land is described in many songs.
Nostalgia of Arcadia
Folk melodies are slow and peaceful, folk lyrics are sung with a twang and evoke the land, the lost land or the departed land, a place attached to a sweet melancholy. The uprooted is a classical motive associated with the folk singer. While Woody Guthrie wanders away from his Oklahoma hills, from his place of birth, on the other part of the world, Paul Brady repairs home to Donegal and brags about the uniqueness of his land, "Where the hearts are like the mountains" (The Homes of Donegal). For the folk singer there is no place like home. A home, interestingly enough, that is often hilly or bumpy... perhaps a sign of seclusion, home is the hidden place that only the folk singer can reach or create through his words. The hill can also offer an evocation of the feminine body, as it is bumpy like the mother land. Or, more prosaically, but still, it makes sense, lots of folk singers come for rural places and they actually do come from some mountain and sing about that. In many a song, the poet delivers an idealized vision of his home as a safe heaven, a secure and peaceful place that he has to leave for one of unrest.
The folk singer is always on the road. But for the Irish and the Americans, the voyage does not allude to the same reality. Two narratives, two histories, one of emigration, one of the frontier. The cowboy and the Irish leave their homes for economic reasons. Danny Doyle sings about that condition in the Irish Emigrant: "In the land I'm going to they say there's bread and work for all". The American movement towards the West brings work too, as sung in the Rambling cowboy: "I left the State of Texas, for Arizona I was bound: I landed in Tombstone city [...]. Money and work were plentiful". But this trip leads to leaving something behind, the loved ones. The land and the girl. For the rambling cowboy, the prettiest girl in the country ended up marrying someone else, Doyle's ending is more tragic as his Mary dies... But still, he will never forget his land, "fifty times as fair".
The bottom line still is: the poet is on the move, like a rolling stone, in an imaginary linked to that of the hobo. He is looking for something better, hoping to adapt into a world in which he does not have a place yet. But even though he does not find one, he makes sure to find some room in his songs, for him and his fellows. Thus, even the hobos have a national anthem and are protected by Woody Guthrie's lullaby with which they "can find peace and rest" (Hobo's lullaby).
So our folk melodies are still stuck in a world of the past in which the poet has not left his hills or mountains or village, they represent a protection against modernization, against the frenetic rhythm of the city and offer a long-awaited appeasement. It is a representation that resisted through time, as even the newest folk records keep evoking home as a comforting place from which you are always away, even with modernity in the field, Kimya Dawson in Tire Swing "checks her emails, makes a few phone calls" and without even realizing it, "it is time to leave again."