10 Songs They Taught Us In School
- Trup Trup a Chapaillín - Or, Giddy Up There Pony. The first song I learned at school, but being aged four, and it being a baby song, I promptly forgot the words and then waited for the Internet to be invented so I could remember them. Alas, armed then with the words once again, I could no longer remember how the tune went. After twenty years of searching I was so pleased with my disappointment.
- Báidín Fheidhlimidh - Little Felim runs away from the bad guys in his tiny, lively, foolish, honest, willing, boat, and heads for an island off the north coast of Ireland. Unable to land he heads for another island only to come a cropper on the rocks and die a violent watery death. Beautiful. One of the great all-time Irish songs, and perfect for kids.
- Oró Sé Do Bheatha ‘Bhaile - Or, Oro She’s the Best of Value, as we sang it in the Gaeltacht to scowling adult faces. Much like the Green Fields of France, it is sung with drunken gusto the world over by Irish men, when they’re singing the chorus that is. Then they mutter and mumble for a few seconds only to return to the chorus louder and drunker. Repeat and rinse.
- Mull of Kintyre - If you write a ballad anywhere in the world, know that there is a teacher in Ireland somewhere who will make forty kids learn it. Like so much of Irish culture the world over, it need not actually be Irish. Do you even know what a Mull is? Still, it will never be as popular as a certain song about West Virginia. And I’m not talking Cavan. Sweep through the heather like deer in the glen
- Amhrán na bhFiann - Everybody should know their own National Anthem, yet most people I’ve met in countries like, oh, Britain, and the USA, do not know all the words to their nation’s official tune. In Ireland however, we do, but most people have no idea what on earth the words they are singing in Irish actually mean. Like the theme from Harry’s Game. As a concept, that’s poetry.
- Fiddlers’ Green - Why wouldn’t Irish people want to die and sing about it when they know a world of self-catching fish awaits them under permanent clear skies where the Dolphins do play, a long way from the Greenland coast? Dingle for the afterlife then. Sorry, I mean An Daingean. Ooh baby do you know what that’s worth? Ooh heaven is a place on earth.
- And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda - When I was eleven, and long before Shane MacGowan, I had a teacher who thought it was important to teach us about limbs being blown off, as if we couldn’t just watch the RTE news. Ataturk and Eric Bogle came out of it well, and we could carry on bombing the Brits. I liked that teacher.
- Buachaill On Eirne - Probably what converted me ultimately to the music of Van Morrison, though I now find myself in a foreign land forever telling people that the Boy is from Lough Erne, not from Ireland. One of the best finishes of any song ever with the line (translated) “And your kiss is no more to me now than a shoe worn for a year”
- Blowing in the Wind - Some of the teachers I had used violence in the conventional school manner of applying strikes of the purpose-made ‘leather’ to outstretched hands. Others were more imaginative and punched heads into concrete pillars, threw kids down staircases, and caned the inside of eleven-year-old wrists. But once in a while teachers were hippies.
- Silver Lady - Yes, by David Soul. As if it wasn’t bad enough that it was number one for six or ten weeks. I think this teacher just broke up with a woman. Or else he had just got a date. And not a hippie he, but a poetry-loving man of usually good taste and considerable brutality. Actually I think he taught us this because that kid who discovered U2 the following year, asked him to.
See Also:
• Irish Conversation in a Dublin Pub #11
• USA & Ireland: Little Differences #3
• Irish Inventions and their Inventors
• The Hairdressers Guide to Information Technology #18
• How Do You Find America?
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