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about
Johnny Seoighe, sung by Micheál Ó Cuaig, an accomplished sean nós singer and educator, and recorded at his home in Carna, Co. Galway, June 2007. Mr. Ó Cuaig is the director of the yearly Joe Heaney Festival, a published poet, and a well-known teacher of the sean nós song tradition.
Field recording: at the site origin of the Irish Hunger Memorial’s cottage in Ballina, County Mayo, January 2006.
The village of Carna in Western Ireland remains an Irish-speaking area and is home to a particularly rich tradition of musicianship and storytelling. It is also part of a greater region that was especially devastated by the famine.
Johnny Seoighe is a sean nós song which originated in Carna during the famine. This fragment of a song, kept quietly alive for more than a century in its native Carna by neighbors and family, is a lonely expression of a time from which almost no music survives.
Johnny Seoighe is a song marked by the specificity and intimacy of its lyrics, referring by name to individuals and places in Carna at the time of the famine. It belongs closely to its place and the miserable circumstances of its creation. For more than a century it was rarely sung.
The sounds of walking evoke three important paths of meaning: the itinerant storyteller who was an important figure in native Irish society; the forced vagrancy experienced during the famine when hundreds of thousands of starving people were evicted from their homes; and the immigration of locally significant cultural expressions away from their origin into unknown lands.
lyrics
Oh Johnny Joyce, heed my voice, as I come to you full of hope / You are the Star of Knowledge, the brightest beacon in the Temple of God / You are the flower of youth, of the finest talk that my eye has seen since I was born / And for the love of Christ, grant me relief, or at least until Christmas Eve is over. / And on the next day I got the piece of paper, and I wasn't happy, me going on my way / But I got no answer at all that day, but my wife and my children left out under the dew. / I am tired, bitter, lashed, frozen, upset and lacerated with the force of the walking / And Mister Joyce, the workhouse is full, and they won't accept one more man. / It is a great source of fame to Carna as long as this couple is passing through / For the woman's appearance is as fine as the Morning Star when it rises / The queen is ill and lying low, the doctors say that she will die / The reason for it all as they said it to me, that she is not married to Mister Joyce. – translated by Dr. Sean Williams, Evergreen University
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