The Emigrant’s Adieu - The story of Irish and Scottish migrants told through their music

Richard Carver introduces his performance/lecture on Irish and Scottish migration for the Oxford Human Rights Festival.

There are obviously many downsides to retiring from CENDEP - but one of the positive things for me has been to free a lot of time to work on one of my passions: music. For more than 50 years I have been an amateur musician, with more enthusiasm than talent, if truth be told. In retirement, my focus has been much less on the classical music that I have played for most of my life than on the traditional music of the British and Irish Isles.

As I immersed myself in this music, I became interested, perhaps rather perversely, in one particular aspect: how tunes got their names. 

It seemed to me that there were broadly four types of name for Irish and Scottish tunes.

First were tunes named after people, usually the composer (Cooley, McMahon), or the person to whom the tune was dedicated (much Scottish music, as well as the Irish music of Turlough O’Carolan).

Next came places: the Cliffs of Moher, Scattery Island, the Island of Mull. And not just beauty spots: Donnybrook Fair for example. And whole counties: the Donegal reel, the Galway hornpipe.

Thirdly comes the whimsical school of naming: Merrily Kissed the Quaker, Where’s the Cat?, the Amorous Goddess. The example linked in the next video illustrates how tune-naming can be highly political. It originated as a Scottish tune called Bonny Charlie. The English called it William of Orange (presumably to troll the Scots). And the Irish made the peace, turned to the supernatural, and turned it into this wonderful tune: the King of the Fairies.

And finally the one that brings us here. It struck me how many tunes have a title that contains the words “farewell” or “leaving.” Farewell to Ireland, to Connaught, to Lochaber, Leaving Lismore, Glenurquhart, Limerick, Aberdeen, Gibraltar even. Not all of these are about emigration, but some clearly are.

One does have to be a bit careful about what these titles actually mean. There is a well-known Irish hornpipe called The Home Ruler. Anyone with a bit of Irish history will know that this refers to the movement for self-government in the nineteenth century - except that it doesn’t. The tune is about the person who rules the home - that is, the man.

With this in mind, I was very careful about researching my next linked tune, the Rights of Man. Apparently very appropriate for a human rights festival - or was it? Fortunately, this was indeed written (or at least named) to honour Thomas Paine’s famous defence of the French Revolution, which also inspired the United Irishmen rebellion against colonialism of 1798. It uses the sexist language of the time, but it actually was about people’s rights.

But this raises another question. How can a tune (as opposed to a song) be “about” something? For those of us who listen mainly to instrumental music, one of its charms is that it allows the listener to imagine their own meaning. In the case of Irish and Scottish music, this is complicated further by the fact that many tunes have multiple titles. Green Fields of America (clearly about migration) is also Miss Monaghan. Paddy’s Gone to France (migration again) is also Over the Moors to Maggie. My answer was not to worry too much - I simply wanted to use the tunes to tell a story.

And that story is of Irish and Scottish migration in the nineteenth century and earlier. Anyone who has taken my refugee module at CENDEP will recall how insistent I was on the importance of refugee scholars studying history and on historians studying refugees. The particular impetus for this project came from a class discussion a couple of years ago, focused on how the mass migrations from Europe to North America in the nineteenth century dwarfed the scale of movements today - even though it is common to describe today’s globalised society as “unprecedented.” (This is clearly done by opponents of immigration, but also sometimes by its defenders, with the best of motives.) 

In the Irish famine of the 1840s, over two million people - more than a quarter of the total population - left the country. This may foreshadow forthcoming environmentally induced migration, but it is still on a much larger scale than anything we have so far seen this century.

So, you see, I am interested in presenting the history of Irish and Scottish migration in a way that illuminates the experience of present-day migrants. I don’t really believe that there are crude “lessons from history” that can be applied today. But I do think that an understanding of the past can help our understanding of the present. In my video, I try to signal some of these parallels and connections: reasons for leaving, choice of destination, the experience of the journey, what happens on arrival, and the maintenance of a transnational community.

It is also important to understand that this is not a simple tale of victimhood. Scots, to a large extent, migrated because they were participants in the British colonial project, unlike most (though not all) Irish. This was apparent in two particular aspects. One was the central role of Highland regiments in the British military (leading, incidentally, to some fantastic music); the other was how Scottish companies were heavily implicated in the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery. 

I am a migrant myself. I now live in Maryland in the United States. Scots played a central role in tobacco production, the tobacco trade, and slave-owning in the county where I now live. In the video, I tell the story of how a community of freed slaves came to call their community “Scotland.”

For some Scottish landowners, these racist attitudes turned inwards and helped to drive the shameful “ethnic cleansing” of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders in the 1840s and 1850s, many of whom were forced from their homes and put on boats to North America and Australia.

I also tell the story of a young man from County Cork, Frank O’Neill, who ran away to sea after the Irish famine, ending up in Chicago as an important figure in the community - and an important figure in the history that I am telling. This video is one of his favourite tunes.

And Frank O’Neill taking his music to Chicago illustrates how the music itself migrates and can tell a story. This final video is of three versions of a well-known folk tune usually known as Dives and Lazarus, after the English ballad to which it was attached. Ralph Vaughan Williams used it three times in his classical compositions.

I play versions here from Ireland, Scotland and South-West Pennsylvania.

The Emigrant’s Adieu - video performance/lecture, followed by discussion. Hybrid event, 12.30pm, Friday 24 March. Free tickets here.

Further information on the tunes that I play in the video can be found by clicking here.