A July Sunday along the northwest coast of County Donegal must be a slow time, I told myself, as I stood on the roadside—again—with my thumb out. The waits were not excessive but the lifts were invariably short and since I'd disembarked from the Tory Island ferry five hours ago I'd made my way about fifteen miles down the road, more than a couple of those miles walking. Dispirited and tired, what with less than five hours of sleep the night before (the Tory Island Festival had lasted far into the wee hours) I began to wonder how much longer I wanted to submit to the discouragement of standing on the side of a mostly empty road.
Then I realized that the side road I was standing near led to the town of Ranafast, the origin of one of the songs I sing—An Chead Mhairt de Fhómhar (The First Tuesday of Autumn). It occurred to me that, if I spent the night nearby, I'd have a chance to do some field research on the song. (I like to validate my poking around with questions about a song as 'doing field research.')
Asking of pedestrian passers-by I found there was a hotel in Anagrai, about a mile away (this being many years before I owned a smart phone). After checking in I asked if there might be a music session anywhere nearby that evening. It turned out there was a singing session that very night at the hotel bar!
I rehearsed An Chead Mhairt several times and thought about the event that was its subject: A father and son had rowed across the mouth of the bay to get supplies in Bunbeg, the town on the other side. After loading their small boat, a wind had come up and the father told the son that since the boat was too heavily laden to be safe for the both of them, and that the son was good enough to row it across himself, the father would walk home the long way around the shore road of the bay. When the father got home much later, he found that the son had never arrived. He wrote the song as a lament for the loss of his son.
That evening I sang the local song and was received with astonishment—How did a Yank end up learning our song? I told them I'd gotten it from Phonsie Mac A Bhaird back in 1982 and some of them actually remembered the elderly schoolmaster from Teelin, in the south of Donegal.
But that was just the beginning. During breaks in the singing one participant told me of a man named Cormac who could show me the rock in the bay where Paudy's body had been found the following day. Another told me that the 'supplies' they were transporting were really big sacks of barley for making poitín (pronounced puh-cheen), illegally distilled 'mountain dew.' Another said that the father was so grief-stricken that he secluded himself for several days. When he came out of his seclusion he had the song composed, all nine long verses. Yet another whispered that maybe it hadn't really been an accident. The son had just broken up with a girlfriend and some thought that he might have capsized the boat on purpose, wanting to end it all because of his own grief. It was evident that the story behind the song still—to this day—carried significant emotional weight.
The next day I walked to Ranafast asking for Cormac. Each person I asked not only knew where Cormac lived (and directed me a little closer—getting directions in Ireland is another whole story) but also knew of the song and the stories behind it. I finally found Cormac who readily stopped what he was doing and walked with me probably a quarter mile along the shore of the bay to a large rock where he said Paudy's body had been found. It was a significant enough feature of the landscape to have a name: Carraig an nDeor or the Rock of Tears. I wish I had questioned him a little more closely for I don't know if he was found on the top of the rock, having died of exposure, or at its base from having been drowned.
What impressed me most about my experience was the power of the story and the evident strong emotions evoked by the song on the local people. It was as if it had happened just a week or two ago. In fact it had happened almost 200 years ago on the first Tuesday of autumn in the year 1811, as detailed in the last verse of the song. In Ireland, history often seems to collapse into the present.