I was just wondering if Irish traditional music would be as popular as it is now if there had been no emigration during the famine.
I know in Ireland the music has faced many challenges to its survival. Henry VIII’s prohibition of Irish music in 1533 for example and Elizabeth’s decree that all bards and harpers be executed, were both survived but the survival of Irish music in Ireland was undoubtedly not due alone to the quality and popularity of the music but also, I suspect, to the rebellious spirit of the people.
My question however is this.. in the period between 1845-1855, two and a half million people emigrated to all corners of the world to escape the hardship of the famine, bringing their songs and music with them. (I do however realise that there was also a pretty large emigration to the ‘Americas’ in the mid 1700’s but this was nothing in comparison to the scale of emigration during the famine.) The music they brought with them found a place in the new world and has become as traditional in many places as it is in Ireland, and remains as popular now as it ever was.
I was thinking that IF the mass spread of Irish music ended with the emigrations in the 1700’s then Irish music would have found it harder to gain a foothold in these new places. I have no doubt about this because there would have been such a different demographic in America and Canada.
So, if it hadn’t been for the emigration during the famine, would Irish music have spread as much as it has?
Would it be as popular (globally) as it is?
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
If I ruled the world I'd decree that all shaky eggists be executed.
Naw, but good discussion topic. I like "what if's". But in this case, off the top of my nearly-bald head, I'd say as there was a constant stream of Irish before and since the famine, Irish music would still have thrived anyway, at home and in the so-called "colonies", if there hadn't been the famine.
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
I reckon if not for the famine, very little ITM would have found it`s way around the globe, yes we would have had people bringing the music back from Ireland but nothing on the scale we have now, just think of all those Irish arriving in Liverpool and Manchester etc, the few pubs that did not have `No travellers, no dogs and no Irish` signs on the door, the music thrived, the network of Irish centres etc, all happened with the massive influx of the Irish.
I think the famine played a huge part in the spread of ITM
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
"if Irish traditional music would be as popular as it is now if there had been no emigration during the famine"
What came to mind when I read this was emigration just before and after the turn of the last century, when Coleman, Killoran, Morrisson and the like came to the US, probably had even more of an impact. The recordings they made made it back to Ireland and influenced the musicians there, and still influence musicians today. I guess you could call this a wave of emigration combining with technological advancement to strengthen the popularity of a genre of music.
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
I think you guys over there have more than enough to contend with at the moment with the floods, but maybe you could force the morris dancers out to spread the tradition.........
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
ITM is pretty marginal and I don't think it's quite correct to say it has survived continuously since emigration - it's more of a folk revival thing since the 1950s
.
If it wasn't for the massive emigration tough, then there wouldn't be country music or even rock and roll, not as we know them now anyway, so the effect on popular music is more significant.
The effect on "ITM" is more in having a large sympathetic audience who feel themselves to be in some small way ethnically or culturally Irish, or even on a more subconscious level their background or even maybe their genes make them gravitate naturally to this type of music.
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
Maybe religion comes into it; people in Catholic Irish communities
would be discouraged from marrying out into Protestant ones. This has probably been a factor in preserving the distinctiveness of Irish communities in lands other than Ireland, such as the USA and the UK - at any rate, to some extent, some of the time.
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
"Though much has been said of the antiquity of our music, it is certain that our finest and most popular airs are modern; and perhaps we may look no further than the last disgraceful century for the origin of most of those wild and melancholy strains which were at once the offspring and solace of grief, and were applied to the mind, as music was formerly to the body, " decantare loca dolentia." (Thomas Moore).
Also, though McKenna and Coleman etc were born and emigrated after the famine, the interest by the recording industry in their music must surely have depended on the presence of an extensive Irish community in the USA- the result of emigration during the famine.
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
Indeed ITM has had an enormous impact on the US music culture, but there have been more such impacts: there is also a lot of French, African, Mexican etc. And if ITM and what became of it hadn´t joined the gumbo west of the Atlantic it might have gone somewhere else or it might have stayed with millions of people migrating to Ireland..... The latter would have required different politics in some of the countries concerned, but why not?
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
I doubt that ITM has had much of a direct effect on US music culture although Irish immigrants have had a very important influence starting with the minstrel period right up until Tin Pan Alley in the 1920's. ITM as we know it was virtually unknown after the second generation of Irish-Americans started to integrate into society and certainly was not a major influence on popular music other than as a prop for stage Irishmen.
The real resurgence came with the later Irish immigrants and then only in Boston and other East coast areas where the irish were in a critical mass and new immigrants arrived on a regular basis. This is where the recordings of Michael Coleman and others came in.
Most of the immigrants from about the Civil War on came because of economic reasons and not the Famine. If you subtract the famine from the equation, the States would have still have a large number of Irish coming over because the economy could not sustain most Irish until relatively recently. The large initial group of Irish that came over due to the famine (and the political shenanigans that accompanied the famine) did act as a draw for others and without the famine the numbers of immigrants would not be the same. But they would have still come over due to the lack of jobs and money, just a little later as the population outgrew the resources.
Irish Americans in my grandparents generation (that would be third generation whose grandparents immigrated) did not know many of the tunes we associate with ITM - possibly "Irish Washerwoman" but that was about it. Most of them knew the Irish-American tunes ("Wild Irish Rose", etc.) through the records of John McCormack which were very popular beyond the Irish-American community. The most popular song writers of that day (Circa 1880-1920) were of Irish descent and many of the popular singers and vaudeville stars were Irish-American. This conceivably was a natural evolution of the musical tastes that the original immigrants brought over (as was step dancing into clogging and tap) and it was Americanized due to the exposure to African and other musics.
If you want to say that ITM had a great "impact" on American music because of that history, you will have to admit that the forms and the music itself did not survive very well but the people did. American popular song of that era is mostly built on waltz time and has two separate parts of verse and chorus. Most of us Americans can still sing the chorus to "Wild Irish Rose", even if you don't want to admit it. (But none know the verse or the tune of the verse.)
The original question was "what if" the famine had not occurred, would ITM be as popular as it is now. I think the answer is "yes" since the music is as popular as, say, model airplane building (even in Ireland) with the same level of intensity in those who love the music. Compare it to rock or even classical music and you will find that the ratio of intense versus casual interest is quite different. While you can excite an audience with the music (Riverdance) you will not find very many casual listeners in the long run.
On the other hand, the music written by the popular Irish-American composers did have a wide spread casual audience. That will never happen with ITM, bluegrass, blues, some types of jazz, or Mongolian throat music because the music is too narrow in scope. While it may influence indirectly and be borrowed from, tit will never be a main stream form.
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
The music thrived because it was good. Joe Cooley, talking of his days playing in the US, said
"You would often see the coloured people, and they'd be tapping their feet anyway. It's the only music that... brings people to their senses, I think"
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
A number of things. Irish music spread throughout the world due to emigration. The biggest period of that was during the famine. So the famine had a big effect.
Now all of these immigrants provided players and an audience. After the folk revival of the 50's the Clancy's and Dubliners and McPeakes found a ready audience in Irish Americans. As the folk revival flourished, the music became more popular, and the new audience drew from a lot of sources, but mainly the diaspora.
As it became popular it became marketable, hence Sweden, Germany, France. As it became mass marketable in a riverdance form, it became immensely popular throughout the world, and no Irish connection was needed.
So the emigration provided an audience, the audience made it marketable, and then the audience expanded to include large numbers of non-Irish.
I realise the "famine" was an economists dream, it was just a potato shortage, but it is generally referred to as "The Famine".
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
When you consider that most of what is called Irish music today is borrowed from someplace else, it might help explain why it is so popular in places it originally came out of.
Perhaps like the enlightened writings kept by Irish Monks during the dark ages, natural music being returned with interest to those from whom it originated?
Also it doesn't take much research to find that most Irish people even in the age of the Famine weren't as Irish as we might be misled into believing.
My family is a typical Heinz 57 Irish mix, We have Scottish, English, French, Scandinavian and oddly a bit of Greek.
Ok ain't exactly exotic but think about this, the personal names given to tunes in the tradition are not solely Irish either. Nor in Co Care today, a place where the music is kept and well kept at that, most of the well know players have everything but Irish names
I often wondered how on earth did a Mr Jackson, a well off gentelman end up on the streets of Limerick in the Victorian era?
One answer that I settled on is that such as he would never have been tolerated in England, and do not forget that during these decades Ireland was very much part of the Kingdom, the Clare Lancers, Clare Dragoons and the rest of it.
In effect I think that the arrival of recording technology allowed our age to both enjoy music and to reclaim what our ancestors tossed away.
So I don't think of Irish Trad comming OUT of Ireland, rather I think of it as a two way street. And sure enough today you can find American OT music in the south west of Ireland.
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
I agree with Bren that the modern trad revival over the past half century dwarfs the influence of a hundred years earlier. But I don’t think the famine immigration had a lot to do with the development of country music in America, which evolved mainly in areas far away from the immigrants’ destinations. Of course, as the music became more commercial in the 1920’s and 30’s and beyond, influences came in from all directions, including Cajun country, Mexico and Hawaii.
If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
I was just wondering if Irish traditional music would be as popular as it is now if there had been no emigration during the famine.
I know in Ireland the music has faced many challenges to its survival. Henry VIII’s prohibition of Irish music in 1533 for example and Elizabeth’s decree that all bards and harpers be executed, were both survived but the survival of Irish music in Ireland was undoubtedly not due alone to the quality and popularity of the music but also, I suspect, to the rebellious spirit of the people.
My question however is this.. in the period between 1845-1855, two and a half million people emigrated to all corners of the world to escape the hardship of the famine, bringing their songs and music with them. (I do however realise that there was also a pretty large emigration to the ‘Americas’ in the mid 1700’s but this was nothing in comparison to the scale of emigration during the famine.) The music they brought with them found a place in the new world and has become as traditional in many places as it is in Ireland, and remains as popular now as it ever was.
I was thinking that IF the mass spread of Irish music ended with the emigrations in the 1700’s then Irish music would have found it harder to gain a foothold in these new places. I have no doubt about this because there would have been such a different demographic in America and Canada.
So, if it hadn’t been for the emigration during the famine, would Irish music have spread as much as it has?
Would it be as popular (globally) as it is?
I dont know, any opinions?
# Posted on June 29th 2007 by session savage
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
If I ruled the world I'd decree that all shaky eggists be executed.
Naw, but good discussion topic. I like "what if's". But in this case, off the top of my nearly-bald head, I'd say as there was a constant stream of Irish before and since the famine, Irish music would still have thrived anyway, at home and in the so-called "colonies", if there hadn't been the famine.
# Posted on June 29th 2007 by Rudall the time
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
i think it would have spread anyway as it's such good music and dancing has always been very popular.
just maybe not so quick?
# Posted on June 29th 2007 by biggus dave
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
Yeah I like to think so too KML
# Posted on June 29th 2007 by session savage
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
I reckon if not for the famine, very little ITM would have found it`s way around the globe, yes we would have had people bringing the music back from Ireland but nothing on the scale we have now, just think of all those Irish arriving in Liverpool and Manchester etc, the few pubs that did not have `No travellers, no dogs and no Irish` signs on the door, the music thrived, the network of Irish centres etc, all happened with the massive influx of the Irish.
I think the famine played a huge part in the spread of ITM
# Posted on June 29th 2007 by tony b
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
if things were different, they wouldn't be the same.
# Posted on June 29th 2007 by DrSilverSpear
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
"if Irish traditional music would be as popular as it is now if there had been no emigration during the famine"
What came to mind when I read this was emigration just before and after the turn of the last century, when Coleman, Killoran, Morrisson and the like came to the US, probably had even more of an impact. The recordings they made made it back to Ireland and influenced the musicians there, and still influence musicians today. I guess you could call this a wave of emigration combining with technological advancement to strengthen the popularity of a genre of music.
# Posted on June 29th 2007 by kennedy
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
and why has English trad music not flourished to the same degree, perhaps we need a famine over here !
# Posted on June 29th 2007 by tony b
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
I think you guys over there have more than enough to contend with at the moment with the floods, but maybe you could force the morris dancers out to spread the tradition.........
# Posted on June 29th 2007 by session savage
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
ITM is pretty marginal and I don't think it's quite correct to say it has survived continuously since emigration - it's more of a folk revival thing since the 1950s
.
If it wasn't for the massive emigration tough, then there wouldn't be country music or even rock and roll, not as we know them now anyway, so the effect on popular music is more significant.
The effect on "ITM" is more in having a large sympathetic audience who feel themselves to be in some small way ethnically or culturally Irish, or even on a more subconscious level their background or even maybe their genes make them gravitate naturally to this type of music.
# Posted on June 29th 2007 by Bren
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
Maybe religion comes into it; people in Catholic Irish communities
would be discouraged from marrying out into Protestant ones. This has probably been a factor in preserving the distinctiveness of Irish communities in lands other than Ireland, such as the USA and the UK - at any rate, to some extent, some of the time.
# Posted on June 29th 2007 by nicholas
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
So how many emigrated to Sweden, France and Germany, where ITM is oddly popular?
# Posted on June 29th 2007 by Innocent Bystander
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
"Though much has been said of the antiquity of our music, it is certain that our finest and most popular airs are modern; and perhaps we may look no further than the last disgraceful century for the origin of most of those wild and melancholy strains which were at once the offspring and solace of grief, and were applied to the mind, as music was formerly to the body, " decantare loca dolentia." (Thomas Moore).
Also, though McKenna and Coleman etc were born and emigrated after the famine, the interest by the recording industry in their music must surely have depended on the presence of an extensive Irish community in the USA- the result of emigration during the famine.
# Posted on June 29th 2007 by Finbar Saunders2
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
Indeed ITM has had an enormous impact on the US music culture, but there have been more such impacts: there is also a lot of French, African, Mexican etc. And if ITM and what became of it hadn´t joined the gumbo west of the Atlantic it might have gone somewhere else or it might have stayed with millions of people migrating to Ireland..... The latter would have required different politics in some of the countries concerned, but why not?
# Posted on June 29th 2007 by Reelin´ man
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
I doubt that ITM has had much of a direct effect on US music culture although Irish immigrants have had a very important influence starting with the minstrel period right up until Tin Pan Alley in the 1920's. ITM as we know it was virtually unknown after the second generation of Irish-Americans started to integrate into society and certainly was not a major influence on popular music other than as a prop for stage Irishmen.
The real resurgence came with the later Irish immigrants and then only in Boston and other East coast areas where the irish were in a critical mass and new immigrants arrived on a regular basis. This is where the recordings of Michael Coleman and others came in.
Most of the immigrants from about the Civil War on came because of economic reasons and not the Famine. If you subtract the famine from the equation, the States would have still have a large number of Irish coming over because the economy could not sustain most Irish until relatively recently. The large initial group of Irish that came over due to the famine (and the political shenanigans that accompanied the famine) did act as a draw for others and without the famine the numbers of immigrants would not be the same. But they would have still come over due to the lack of jobs and money, just a little later as the population outgrew the resources.
Irish Americans in my grandparents generation (that would be third generation whose grandparents immigrated) did not know many of the tunes we associate with ITM - possibly "Irish Washerwoman" but that was about it. Most of them knew the Irish-American tunes ("Wild Irish Rose", etc.) through the records of John McCormack which were very popular beyond the Irish-American community. The most popular song writers of that day (Circa 1880-1920) were of Irish descent and many of the popular singers and vaudeville stars were Irish-American. This conceivably was a natural evolution of the musical tastes that the original immigrants brought over (as was step dancing into clogging and tap) and it was Americanized due to the exposure to African and other musics.
If you want to say that ITM had a great "impact" on American music because of that history, you will have to admit that the forms and the music itself did not survive very well but the people did. American popular song of that era is mostly built on waltz time and has two separate parts of verse and chorus. Most of us Americans can still sing the chorus to "Wild Irish Rose", even if you don't want to admit it. (But none know the verse or the tune of the verse.)
The original question was "what if" the famine had not occurred, would ITM be as popular as it is now. I think the answer is "yes" since the music is as popular as, say, model airplane building (even in Ireland) with the same level of intensity in those who love the music. Compare it to rock or even classical music and you will find that the ratio of intense versus casual interest is quite different. While you can excite an audience with the music (Riverdance) you will not find very many casual listeners in the long run.
On the other hand, the music written by the popular Irish-American composers did have a wide spread casual audience. That will never happen with ITM, bluegrass, blues, some types of jazz, or Mongolian throat music because the music is too narrow in scope. While it may influence indirectly and be borrowed from, tit will never be a main stream form.
Mike Keyes
http://www.mikekeyes.com
http://www.banjosessions.com
# Posted on June 29th 2007 by mikeyes
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
There never was a 'famine'
# Posted on June 29th 2007 by Pól
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
Not in England where all the Irish food was being shipped there wasn't.
# Posted on June 29th 2007 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
The music thrived because it was good. Joe Cooley, talking of his days playing in the US, said
"You would often see the coloured people, and they'd be tapping their feet anyway. It's the only music that... brings people to their senses, I think"
# Posted on June 29th 2007 by howsshecutting
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
A number of things. Irish music spread throughout the world due to emigration. The biggest period of that was during the famine. So the famine had a big effect.
Now all of these immigrants provided players and an audience. After the folk revival of the 50's the Clancy's and Dubliners and McPeakes found a ready audience in Irish Americans. As the folk revival flourished, the music became more popular, and the new audience drew from a lot of sources, but mainly the diaspora.
As it became popular it became marketable, hence Sweden, Germany, France. As it became mass marketable in a riverdance form, it became immensely popular throughout the world, and no Irish connection was needed.
So the emigration provided an audience, the audience made it marketable, and then the audience expanded to include large numbers of non-Irish.
I realise the "famine" was an economists dream, it was just a potato shortage, but it is generally referred to as "The Famine".
# Posted on June 30th 2007 by bodhran bliss
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
When you consider that most of what is called Irish music today is borrowed from someplace else, it might help explain why it is so popular in places it originally came out of.
Perhaps like the enlightened writings kept by Irish Monks during the dark ages, natural music being returned with interest to those from whom it originated?
Also it doesn't take much research to find that most Irish people even in the age of the Famine weren't as Irish as we might be misled into believing.
My family is a typical Heinz 57 Irish mix, We have Scottish, English, French, Scandinavian and oddly a bit of Greek.
Ok ain't exactly exotic but think about this, the personal names given to tunes in the tradition are not solely Irish either. Nor in Co Care today, a place where the music is kept and well kept at that, most of the well know players have everything but Irish names
I often wondered how on earth did a Mr Jackson, a well off gentelman end up on the streets of Limerick in the Victorian era?
One answer that I settled on is that such as he would never have been tolerated in England, and do not forget that during these decades Ireland was very much part of the Kingdom, the Clare Lancers, Clare Dragoons and the rest of it.
In effect I think that the arrival of recording technology allowed our age to both enjoy music and to reclaim what our ancestors tossed away.
So I don't think of Irish Trad comming OUT of Ireland, rather I think of it as a two way street. And sure enough today you can find American OT music in the south west of Ireland.
.
# Posted on June 30th 2007 by Schlongbow
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
If it wasn't for emigration during the famine I wouldn't be here today, in fact I wouldn't have happened at all! Amazing that.
# Posted on July 1st 2007 by Clear Drops
Re: If it wasn't for emigration during the famine!!!
I agree with Bren that the modern trad revival over the past half century dwarfs the influence of a hundred years earlier. But I don’t think the famine immigration had a lot to do with the development of country music in America, which evolved mainly in areas far away from the immigrants’ destinations. Of course, as the music became more commercial in the 1920’s and 30’s and beyond, influences came in from all directions, including Cajun country, Mexico and Hawaii.
# Posted on July 3rd 2007 by Bob himself