“I remember the day well.” he said. “They let us out of school for the day and everyone in town was helping in one way or another.” My informant was speaking of the “fourth day of October in nineteen hundred and seven,” when the freighter De Leon was shipwrecked off the coast of County Clare within sight of the fishing village of Quilty—a momentous several days for that tiny seacoast town.
I was there to find out more about a song that I'd heard and recorded in a nearby town the year before. It was a broadside ballad (or “come all ye”) that told the story of the successful rescue of the twelve crewmen and the captain of the French ship De Leon by the fishermen of Quilty. It's all the more amazing knowing that the rescue was made in their little lath-and-canvas fishing boats, usually called currachs but in this town called canoes (pronounced can-OHZ).
It was but a four-mile walk to Quilty from Miltown Malbay where I was attending my second “Willie Week,” the famed Willie Clancy Summer Music School. I stopped at the pub in the center of the village—it had only one pub, one store, one chapel, and several dozen houses—to ask if anyone knew about the song and its background. It turns out that pretty much everyone knew about the song and I was directed up the street to where a man lived who could tell me all about it. He was one of three people still living in the village who actually experienced the event seventy-six years before.
I was a novice at doing field research on songs and I didn't record the name of my informant but the story was so compelling (and I've retold it so often) that I trust my memory for the following details. The De Leon had come from Portland (yes, Portland, Oregon) and was carrying wheat to Europe when a storm disabled its rudder. Drifting helplessly, it ended up grounding on the rocks about two miles out in the bay from Quilty. A distress flare was sent up and the local fishermen responded with “eighteen men in six canoes with Tom Boyle on the lead.” They rescued everyone on the foundering ship and were rewarded by the owner of the hotel (two miles away in Spanish Point) who threw open his bar to anyone involved in the rescue. That fact is memorialized in the song by the line “and brought them back to safety to our own little isle so green, where beverage flows spontaneously.” Suddenly, according to my informant, there were many more people involved in the rescue!
But the song doesn't tell what happened during the next two days. The storm abated quickly and the next day was calm. And when opportunity knocked, the villagers eagerly responded. They spent the day traveling to and from the stricken ship, off-loading as much wheat as they could carry in their small boats. The grain was spoiled by the salt water but it was certainly good enough for the pigs of the village, who grew nice and fat the following year!
A day later another storm came in from the west and washed the De Leon completely away. Not a trace was left of her, other than one ring buoy that had somehow made its way to shore. Decades later someone found a ship's bell engraved with the name “De Leon” in a second-hand shop in London and brought it to the town. It's assumed that it was indeed the ship's bell but it remains a mystery how it was saved or ended up in London.
Jump ahead 76 years to the Willie Week in '83. I had learned the song in the intervening year and had sung it several times in sessions during the week. I was standing at the urinal in a pub—in rural Ireland at the time (and still in many places) the urinal was a wall with a trough at the bottom and an occasional flush from above—and who should come up next to me but Ollie Conway, the singer I'd heard the song from the previous year. I introduced myself and thanked him for the song. He turned to me and said, “So you're the one. People have been telling me that some Yank has been singing my song.” I held my breath for what was to come next. He continued with a smile, “And you're welcome to it!”