In 1991 the BBC put out a series of TV programmes, ‘Bringing It All Back Home’, about the influence of Irish music on American folk and country music and the cross fertilisation of American music back to Ireland. Naturally, given the history, a lot of the songs were about emigration, and the experience of loss and longing, on the part both of the emigrants and the ones they are leaving behind. Here is a heartbreaking example, from the same series.
This song ‘Sonny’ is about the other side of this - of the one who didn’t leave. It tells of the fear of the mother that her son will, like those of so many other mothers, leave her alone. And when at last it is he who is left alone, it’s as if his life had had its meaning taken from him. It is sung here in a famous recording from 1991 by Emmy Lou Harris, Mary Black and Dolores Keane. The wailing uillean pipes, Ireland’s equivalent of country music’s steel guitar, seem to speak achingly of Sonny yearning for something he could never have and which he has no words for.
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This is lovely. Thank you for posting it.