Irish music is not my strong point. I don't mean U2, Van Morrison, Sinead O'Connor or The Hothouse Flowers - I mean Riverdance, Celtic Women and the other purveyors of "traditional" Irish music. I admire the precision, the technique, the desire to preserve a traditional culture - the content is what bothers me. I don't think I've ever heard a happy traditional Irish tune, with the exception of "Irish Eyes" - but even that isn't entirely upbeat. I always think of Irish music as being incredibly mournful, tales of lost loves and lost lives sung by long haired women with sad eyes playing harps. Jigs and reels are happy and upbeat, but I've heard more ballads than blowouts , which explains my built-in prejudice.
Besides , Saint Patrick's day isn't really a holiday - it's an opportunity to get wasted. which seems incredibly un -PC, not to mention the image it creates of the Emerald Isle. The schizophrenic nature of the annual whatever was amply illustrated during one forgettable period in my broadcasting career when I spent St. Pat's doing live "drops" from an Irish watering hole in scenic Framingham. No one wanted to be interviewed since they had blown off work and were afraid their bosses might recognize their voices. I couldn't drink with them since I had to stay alert, so I simply watched them get slowly trashed. The high point was interviewing one extremely wasted barfly who finally agreed to talk on the air only so she could unleash one of those words you're not supposed to say, thus earning me a blistering phone call from the station manager. The final indignity on that particular occasion happened a few minutes after my shift ended, pulling over to retch on the side of Route 9, the result of eating a free sandwich.
I'm not arguing about the nobility of suffering and the need for poetic expression through song; I'm just wondering why the dominant emotion has to be despair. Ironically, there is a definite parallel between the legacy of American blues music and my perception of Irish music - the same bleak view of romance, the feeling of being trapped by your unalterable circumstances. I'm reminded of a picture I saw on the wall of an excavation outside Williamsburg, Virginia, part of an exhibit documenting one of the earliest English settlements, which depicted a bug-eyed, long haired being identified as a wild Irishman. The captured Celts were imported from the Auld Sod as slaves to the colonists in the same way Africans were kidnapped to work on Southern plantations. Perhaps this is the link, the cross-cultural emotional core that links the two seemingly divergent forms, proof that suffering produces great art.
However, even though I am supposedly part Irish, I'm not about to let that wave of emotion wash me away this Saint Patrick's Day. Chances are better that I'll take a few swallows of (green) beer to remind myself that the glass is never half empty but in fact, half full.
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