SARAH  MAKEM

 

18^th October  1900 - 20^th April 1983

 

My Life for a Song

 

 

‘Sarah Makem was the Irish folk tradition personified.’

 

                                                            Neil Johnston in The Belfast Telegraph, 1983

 

 

(1)

 

 

If the mere facts of Sarah Makem’s life would fit comfortably onto one side of an A4 page, an assessment of her contribution to the history of folk music might run to several volumes.  She was born, lived, and died, in County Armagh, spent hardly any time away from it, travelled little, spoke less, and wrote nothing at all, yet her name today is as revered as that of Jean Ritchie, Pete Seeger, or Bob Dylan, for what Sarah did was sing.  She sang when she was happy and she sang when she was sad, and she sang when she was angry - you could always tell what mood she was in by the way she sang: ‘If you hear me singing loud, don’t come in!’ she’d warn.  But what she couldn’t do was to sing sitting down, and very often when one of the song collectors who flocked to her house like bees round a honey pot stuck a microphone in her face, she couldn’t sing at all.  The words and the tune might leave her, and not come back till she was wandering about the house again, making a drop of tea for the visitors, with the hapless recording engineer following after her like a shadow.

 

            She was, like many an Irishwoman of her generation, an ordinary woman with an extraordinary gift, one of those many flowers who, as Gray remarks in his great Elegy, might have been born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness in the desert air, had it not been for the burgeoning interest in folk music in the middle of the last century that brought her into the public eye.  It is fortunate that the will and the means were there to preserve her legacy before the inevitability of mortality consumed it.

 

            She was born with the century, on High Street, Keady, the daughter of Tommy Boyle, a plumber and tinsmith, and Margaret Greene, and like most people in the town, as soon as she was old enough to leave school, she went to work in one of the linen mills that thronged the lush valleys of the Clay and the Callan.  Sarah was one of seven children whose father died young, and though her own mother had it hard enough to rear her family, working as a winder for which she could earn eleven shillings a week with a sixpenny bonus, for she was the best worker in the mill, she too loved to sing, and this love of music has passed down through the generations, via Jack, who sang and played the fiddle and the uileann pipes; Tommy, international ambassador for all that is best in the north; to the present day, with one of Sarah’s great-grand-daughters singing in a voice that resembles her grandmother’s.

 

            Sarah enjoyed her schooldays.  She loved the nuns who taught them, Sister Columba, Sister Bonaventure, Sister Malachy, and found no difficulty in learning, usually coming second or third in the class behind Agnes Loughran, but she looked forward to starting work.  Early on she took a job brushing out the schoolrooms, but her first mill job was at the ‘giving-in’ where lengths of linen were presented for finishing.  For this she earned two and sixpence (12.5 pence, same as half-a-crown!), and it was her responsibility to ensure that each length was perfect.  Sometimes the girls might be tempted to accept a piece with a tiny flaw, but if the cloth-passer noticed it when he double-checked it, retribution came in the form of a docked pay!

 

            From seven in the morning until six-thirty at night she and other young women toiled at the shuttles or the looms, and as they walked to and from the mills, four miles over the hill path to Darkley or, like her, down into the village to where the old mill restaurant now stands, they sang.  They sang at their work too, despite the noise from the machinery.  Perhaps it was their way of drowning out the symphony of spindle and bobbin, or maybe their strategy for keeping their sanity intact.  Sarah became a weaver, and though she might recall that the work wasn’t too hard, we may be sure it wasn’t easy, not just as hard, maybe, as for the women in Darkley who worked at the wet spinning and spent their days knee-deep in water, but tiring and tedious.  They got a break for breakfast at eight-fifteen, a lunch break from one-fifteen until two, and then worked till half-past-six, more than ready to demolish the two or three cakes of bread they would bake for tea when they got home.  In this atmosphere, songs were a lifeline, and if someone introduced a new one it was regarded as a priceless gift, with everyone eager to learn it.  In their darkest days the Irish have always dug deep into their inner selves and discovered the healing power of music, a music that could celebrate, satirise, praise, or mourn, but that in some subliminal fashion, could always lift the heart.

 

            Along with her love of singing, Sarah’s mother passed on many of the songs she herself learned in her youth, some from her own mother; but Sarah acquired songs from anybody who came within her orbit, and if she didn’t get all the words first time, she would make a point of checking them, sometimes making notes for herself.  Music was in the family’s genetic blueprint: the Greenes all sang, and there are recordings of Annie Jane Kelly (née Greene), both on her own and dueting with Sarah, in the BBC Community Archive; and according to Sarah, their Uncle Jimmy ‘could sing the balls off the horses’.  Johnny Greene, who lived beside them when they were growing up, gave her the lovely ballad Derry Gaol, and her younger sister Molly sang for Cardinal Logue when he visited the Convent where she was a pupil; her rendition of My Irish Molly-O earned her half-a-crown, which bought a length of Darkley linen to make new pinnies for herself and her sisters.  Another rich source was discovered in the travellers or merchants from England or Scotland who dealt with the thriving manufacturers in the area -  though the English tradition was not as robust as that of our Celtic neighbours  - along with the radio or gramophone records, so her store of songs increased exponentially without conscious effort.  She only had to hear a song once to remember it perfectly, though her memory was not remarkable in any other way; and once she learned a song she never altered or amended it.  She never sang in public, say at a concert, though singing was more natural to her almost than speaking, but it was part of the fabric of her life rather than something she did at certain times or in certain circumstances; and she never wrote an original song. 

 

            David Hammond considered her to be one of the best traditional singers in the world, with a voice that was low in pitch, assured and lyrical, effortless and celebratory.  Her talent was to lay bare the emotion that underpinned the writing, the ecstasy or the pathos, the story behind the song, and her motivation was simply the love of singing.  If she had any message to impart it was this: Always be proud to sing your own songs, for she valued the traditions and the country that shaped her.  She didn’t see herself as a woman with a mission, nor did she set out to preserve the rich heritage of folksong, for as son Tommy remarks, she wouldn’t have recognised a folk ballad if it had jumped up and bit her.  It’s just that some people are born to lead and some to follow, some to rise, others to fall.  Sarah, it seems, was born to sing.

 

*****
(11)

 

 

But for the force of true love, Keady might have lost Sarah altogether, and in another setting, her voice might not have reached as wide an audience as it ultimately did.  An awful lot of people from South Armagh had emigrated to Dover, New Hampshire, finding work in the cotton mills there, no doubt encouraged by one Tommy McKearney who came over from the States on a recruiting mission for the industry, lured by the fame of the Keady workers.  Amongst these were some of Sarah’s siblings, and, as each one made a bit of money, they would send home for the next in line, enclosing the fare.  By the time it came to Sarah’s turn, she had met Peter Makem from Derrynoose, probably at one of the impromptu dances on The Parade that made up an evening’s entertainment, where, if there was no musician handy, someone would lilt or play the spoons.  Not that there was any shortage of musicians as a rule, for Francis Hughes would often be there or Sarah’s own cousin, Maggie Greene, Mrs Coulter, to play the mouth organ, and those neighbours who didn’t want to dance brought out stools to sit and listen to the music.  It was an infectious rhythm that they provided, and many a time the policemen came out of their barracks on the corner of the street and joined in the dancing.

 

            The two young lovers decided that it would be an awful pity to waste good money on the journey to America when they could stay at home and use it to get married.  It is not recorded what the relatives thought when they heard that their hard-earned cash was taking the younger sister to the altar rather than to the docks, but the Irish have always had a soft spot for lovers.  We don’t know whether she ever regretted not ‘taking the boat’, but emigration took far too many away from these shores, and for every one who made good in their new home there was at least one other who did not.  It hasn’t gone unnoticed that there are many sad emigration songs, but very few happy ones.  They say that Sarah actually got as far as packing her case but Peter came along and took it from her, indicating that she should stay where she was.  The decline of the linen trade after the war opened the floodgates so that what was once a trickle became a stream, and there are men in Keady today who remember how it was in the 1950s after the mills shut down: suitcases piled forlornly two or three deep round the monument - appropriately enough, since it was the enterprise of William Kirk that put the area on the map in the previous century - while the men spent their last few minutes in the public houses saying goodbye to their friends, before the bus came to take them to Belfast on the first stage of a journey that for many of them was undertaken on a one-way ticket.

 

             But she did eventually make four journeys to the States, including one trip on the luxury liner the Queen Elizabeth from Southampton, which she described as ‘a holiday in itself.’  She liked Dover, finding it bigger but not so very different from her home town, but New York didn’t appeal to her at all.  She couldn’t think of one single thing she liked about it, unless it was the memorable occasion when she was among the crowd in Carnegie Hall who gave the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem a standing ovation.  She was amazed at their popularity, remembering later how ‘they were killing other to get in; sure there were more people outside than in at the finish; they were fighting to get tickets.’  When pressed by interviewer Barry Cowan^[1] to express how she felt on that evening, she admitted to being ‘a kinda proud.’!

 

            After her wedding on 9^th July 1918, with Maggie Nugent as her bridesmaid, they had a bit of a party in Woods’s pub and then went on to her sister’s house for a big night.  It mightn’t have lasted just as long as the hooley in Mary Anne’s when someone produced a bottle or two of potin, and nobody went home before six in the morning, but it was good crack all the same.  Sarah and Peter lived up the Mountainy Road with a sister until they got two rooms from Johnny Mone, which they furnished mainly with wedding presents, then finally came to live in Victoria Street on the site of the house where her own mother had been born, and set about rearing their family: Jack, Mona, Peggy, Nancy, and Tommy.  Very much a woman of her time, she believed in folk cures, knew how to wash and lay out a corpse, dealt with mumps by getting the sufferer to don a donkey’s blinkers, and saw off a sty by gathering nine gooseberry thorns, then pointing each one in turn at the infection before burying them in the earth.  She had only the minimum of formal education but was a very bright woman with a talent for form-filling, and she loved to read:  her favourite author was Annie M P Smithson, an Irish writer popular throughout the ’20s and ’30s who could weave a fine romance with a dash or two of the supernatural for good effect.  She knew all that was happening in the area, and the wider world as well, for she listened to the radio, and hers was one of the first houses to have a television set.  The neighbours would gather in to watch a boxing match or the results of an election, and as usual Sarah would be in the thick of it, making tea and singing.  She was a good cook, and her grandchildren remember her soup with dumplings, so tasty that you wanted to eat them quickly, yet so good that you didn’t want them to be finished!  She was houseproud, always busy ‘redding up’, and she used to do a bit of sewing on an old treadle sewing machine - naturally enough, a Singer. 

 

            Husband Peter was an accomplished musician, playing the fiddle, the flute, and the drum, when he wasn’t working as a scutcher, or more precisely a dresser, the second man in the team, hard and dangerous work, separating the outer layers of the flax from the inner fibres at the start of the manufacturing process.  It was so dusty that if you held your hand out at arm’s length in front of you, you could scarcely see it, and most of the workers finished their days with their lungs in a sorry state, Peter himself always short of breath.  You were taking your life in your hands if you entered the scutching mill unannounced for more than one reason: the atmosphere was so dry that the men used to roll up a chaw of tobacco in a wee wad of tow and pop it inside their cheeks to keep their mouths moist, and you could never predict where a spit would light!  The youngsters used to bring them down their ‘piece’ or a can of tea, but in later years the workers built a shanty down at the mill where they made a fire using the ‘shows’ (pron. shous) which were lighted inside a structure made from a few bricks laid on their ends like a small chimney; when the fire was well alight these were removed and you had a perfect means of brewing your own tea.  Here they held lying contests, which attracted a great deal of interest, and not just from the scutchers!^[2]  Sarah might not have approved of them, though.  ‘No good in telling a lie and the truth beside it,’ she once said.

 

            Peter remained a mill-worker until the ‘Belgian scutchers’ - mechanical ones - took over, and he was in and out of different jobs for a while, but he was always happy to open his house to visitors.  David Hammond remembers the couple’s hospitality and warmth, and Tommy Makem recalls his father sitting slightly off-side vis-à-vis the action during recording sessions, not over-awed though maybe a bit bemused by all the attention, yet smoking and tapping his pipe to the rhythm of the songs when he wasn’t called upon to play.

 

            Tommy’s earliest memory of his mother is of her singing, and he imbibed a love of it, one might guess, from his first breath, though there were times as children when they got a bit tired of the constant musical accompaniment to their every action!  He recounts the story of her singing to him as she rocked the wooden cradle with her foot, and then, thinking him asleep, quietly getting up to steal away and get on with her work, but halted by a voice from within:  ‘Sing another one, mammy!’  And that was no hardship to Sarah.

 

*****

(111)

 

 

Sarah’s emergence into the limelight is usually attributed to her rendition of As I Roved Out (Seventeen Come Sunday) being used as the theme tune for the radio programme of the same name in the early 1950s.  David Hammond, who made a short biopic of Sarah in 1977, credits this programme with the revival of interest in Irish folk music that gathered momentum throughout the ’60s and ’70s, and is still alive and thriving today, but of course it didn’t happen overnight, and was itself part of a larger picture.

 

            Peter Kennedy, whose father founded the English folk song and dance society, introduced Sarah to Sean O’Boyle, a noted scholar and folklorist, who taught in Armagh College, and he soon recognised what a treasure trove was there on his own doorstep as he started to record her songs.  She never wrote any of them down herself, though she once compiled a list of titles, and it was only when more and more people started turning up at her door that those around her, including her son Tommy, began to appreciate and preserve them too.  Estimates of the extent of her repertoire vary from five hundred to one thousand different numbers, but she herself would admit that she could rattle off four hundred songs without effort.

 

            Tommy went off to the USA to try his luck as an actor even though he had had an offer from the Old Vic, but he decided that he might have better success on the other side of the Atlantic.  So it was to prove, but success lay in a quite different direction when he teamed up with the Clancy Brothers to do a bit of singing, made a by now historic appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, and took America by storm.  His acting skills and mellifluous voice would stand him in good stead on the folk circuit, for he is the ultimate showman, managing an audience better than anyone I know.  It is worth noting that his success and his mother’s growing celebrity flowed along in tandem rather than piggy-backing off each other.  He came home once for a holiday, hired a car, threw his suitcase and banjo onto the back seat and headed for Keady.  He was probably looking forward to a quiet night with the family, but he found the kitchen occupied by a class from a well-known university in mid-western America, students and tutor draped over every possible chair and table, Sarah weaving in and out amongst them, singing and making tea while they wrote down everything she sang. 

 

            On another occasion he called in to the offices of Tradition Records in New York  to see Paddy Clancy, and began rooting through a box of cassette tapes.  He came across one of his mother’s and a glance at the play-list revealed three songs that he had never heard her sing, including The Butcher Boy, a very fine ballad and one that he has performed many a time since.  His mother’s songs have formed part of his repertoire throughout his long career, sometimes more, sometimes less, but always there.  The first song he ever sang in public was The Little Beggarman, at a concert in Keady Town Hall where his sisters were appearing in the Convent choir; he sang it again at a gig a few weeks ago.  Perhaps conscious of his indebtedness, he made sure that whenever he made a new record, Sarah got a copy, and she herself had several long-playing records to her credit, notably Sarah Makem Sings, and Sarah Makem, Ulster Ballad Singer.

 

            If Sarah never altered a song or a tune her son had no such compunction, and the fortuitous combination of Sarah’s talent for remembering and Tommy’s talent for performing has brought these songs to audiences worldwide.  Sometimes she might only have a verse or two of a song, like The Darkley Weaver, and then Tommy would embellish it, write a few new verses, or splice it with another song of a similar theme, in this case, Nancy Whiskey, and so the folk tradition continues as a living thing.  His version of As I Roved Out uses two verses and the chorus as received from his mother, and adds in part of another version of the song.  In this way the tradition never becomes stale, but is like water in motion, keeping the rhythm, changing the flow.

 

            When Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger got to hear of Sarah and her songs, they must have felt as if all their birthdays had come together, but she accepted their attention with equanimity, though in later years she would concede that their interest surprised her a bit.  She may not have realised that Seeger and The Weavers were already achieving almost legendary status in the world of song collecting, but it wouldn’t have bothered her.  Jean Ritchie, Diane Hamilton, Pete Seeger, or wee Joe Molloy from Keady who was passing the door one night when a session was under way and paused to peep in the window to see the crack:  ‘Come in and look out, Joe, and while you’re at it, lilt us a bit of a song,’  it was all the same to her.  Her attitude was ‘Let them all come and talk away.  Sure you wouldn’t turn anybody away from your door.’

 

            Jean Ritchie^[3] found this to be very much the case when she made Sarah’s acquaintance in 1952.  This is her recollection of their first meeting:

 

            It was like being at home in Kentucky when Sarah opened her door to us and welcomed us in.  Neat as a pin, wearing an apron and not worried about that, smiling, outgoing, as though we were close neighbors dropping in.

 

            Sarah immediately put the kettle on, then seated us near the kitchen table, chatting and asking interested questions (where do you live?  do you have kin in our parts?  do you like Ireland?) while she got the big bacon slab onto a sideboard, cutting slices and, when the talking dwindled, went about making the tea, frying the bacon and tomatoes, singing and humming all the while.  Of course, George had the Magnacorder set up by then, and you can hear her, under the song, walking about the kitchen, slicing the meat, and her song going over it all:

 

            As I roved out on a May morning.

 

            On a May morning right early,

 

            I met me love upon the way,

 

            O lord but she was early.

 

            And she sang, lilt-a-doodle,

 

            Lilt-a-doodle day

 

            And she ha'ed-along-a-day,

 

            And she ha'ed-along-a-day

 

            And she l'ahndie. 

 

            (Note: I give the sound of the words; never thought to translate them!)

 

Later she rounded up a roomful of neighboring friends bearing pipes, fiddles, banjos; her sons Jack and Tommy and daughter-in-law Nancy came by, husband Paeder (sic) got his fiddle down, and Sarah joined in the singing.  Never throughout the evening was she weary, in body or in spirit, and we all, including Sarah thoroughly enjoyed the music far into the night.  She encouraged various folks to sing, or play a tune, and the only hard work she did was to see that everyone was having fun.

 

            I could see that her family was very important to her, as was her home and her place in the community.  She valued her place there, and her main love besides her nearest and dearest was the music.  The music to her, as it has always been to me, (in Kentucky and  wherever else I have been in the world), a wondrous accompaniment to the series of events, hardships, sorrows and joys which made up her life.’            

 

            Liam Clancy’s account of those evenings spent in Sarah’s house conjures up a lively and happy, if slightly chaotic, scene:

 

            ‘The recording sessions at Makem’s house were memorable.  Peter, the man of the house, with his pipe and fiddle: ‘Oh, aye.  Oh, begod, aye,’ was all he ever seemed to say; and Jack, his son: ‘Don’t give that man another drop or he won’t be able to play at all.’  Ann Jane Kelly, the neighbour, with a perpetual fag bigger than herself, shouting, ‘Make the tay, make the tay.’  Tommy, the youngest son, in the corner nearly as shy as myself (hard to imagine now).  And the girls hustling and bustling, making pots of tea and cutting cake with non-stop (and to me, a southerner, completely unintelligible) chatter and they all buzzing around the queen bee herself, Sarah Makem, as she sat placid in the eye of the hurricane.’^[4]

 

            Liam has very warm memories of those times and it was perhaps the similarities between the Makem and Clancy families which laid the foundation for the friendship and successful musical partnership that would follow.  Both families loved nothing better than to pile into a car and go for a run, and no sooner had they done so than someone would start a sing-song.

 

            ‘It was the most natural thing in the world,’ Liam told me.  ‘It was many years before I realised that not everybody did that!’

 

            Tommy and his Chicago-born wife Mary, whose parents hailed from Cahirciveen, used to take Sarah on motoring trips round Ireland so that she might visit some of the places she sang about, but many years before that he took both his parents to Carrick-on-Suir to meet the Clancys, only about a hundred miles as the crow flies, but in those days, another world.  Nowadays the speed of travel has diminished distance, and the media has introduced us to accents more regional than our own, but then it was a different story and communication was well-nigh impossible.  Liam recalls that Sarah was chattering away to Mama Clancy for about five minutes while his mother nodded her head and smiled in what she hoped were the right places, until Liam came in with, ‘For goodness’ sake, mam, would you pass Sarah a sandwich before she starves to death!’

 

            The men did what Irishmen have done since time immemorial when a crisis looms: they went to the pub, and Peter Makem was able to enjoy a few hours in Lawlor’s, where words didn’t matter.  The massive hangover they all had next morning was not eased by their being dragged off by the women to a picnic on Tramore’s lovely beach, but under the pretext of showing Peter the town’s historic sights, Tom Clancy negotiated them back into a bar.  There John Cooney produced a marvellous new product that he had brought from England, sure to cure a hangover or any other ill for that matter, and Peter eagerly accepted a box of Alka-Seltzer tablets.  Some time later Liam noticed that he hadn’t returned from the gents’.  He found him slumped over the basin, the froth coming down his nose, out of his mouth, practically out of his ears.  He looked up at Liam apologetically.

 

            ‘Tarra to God, boy,’ he murmured, ‘but them tablets is awful hard to swally.’

 

            Liam acknowledges his debt to Sarah’s ‘vast store of songs’, and mentions in particular The Month of January and Derry Gaol.  Another favourite is Red is the Rose.  He was flicking through a book when he was on the road as one half of the Makem and Clancy duo, and he turned this one up.  Tommy said it was one of his mother’s, sung to the tune of ‘Loch Lomond’, but wasn’t sure of its current appeal.  Liam was attracted by the words, so he picked up the guitar and played a few bars, brought in the minor chords, sang the first few lines.  It became one of their most successful numbers ever.

 

            Liam has travelled the world both as an entertainer and as a song collector, and is sure of Sarah’s place in the canon of greats, but tellingly reflects that today’s society could neither produce nor sustain another such as she.  And why?  ‘Because there’s no one to listen,’ he says. 

 

            But there’s always someone to listen, and I think the best testimony to the importance of Sarah’s legacy is this story from Tommy Makem.

 

            There was a certain man from Keady town who was known as a wild man.  Ireland has had her share of them, from Ned Kelly to the Wild Colonial Boy, but this fellow could give any of them a run for their money.  He had been many years away from home and wound up in a bush hospital in Africa, nursing an injury - how he came by it, who can say?  As he lay there one Sunday morning he heard Sarah’s ‘roaring, tearing’ voice^[5] singing As I Roved Out, probably courtesy of the BBC World Service, and his reaction was very much like that of W F Marshall: It stopped my step on the hard stone, that breath of an Irish song; and there and then he made up his mind that he would make it his business to come home. 

 

            And he did.

 

*****

(1V)

 

 

Sarah embodied the values of an age that is gone: courtesy, open-handedness, a sense of place.  She was a woman of strong Christian principles firmly rooted in the Ulster soil that gave her birth, completely unaffected, perhaps even unattracted, by the trappings of fame, whose name today evokes accolades like ‘warm’, ‘lively’, ‘intelligent’, ‘generous’, ‘hospitable’, and indeed she was all of these things; but the over-riding impression is of a kindly woman with a sense of humour.  It was probably this, along with her songs, that kept her going when times were tough.  She took great delight in singing to aggravate, and if she got a red-hot Republican within earshot she would let rip with a rousing Orange ditty, but if Dr. Dorman came by, the same doctor who had carried out the medical examination required before she was allowed to take up her job in the mill, she would sing the most fiery rebel song she knew.  Once when Peter was working for EBNI^[6]  ‘The Twelfth’ was to be held in Keady and some of his colleagues, he knew, would be there to participate.  Sarah told them they needn’t think of coming to Keady unless they called for a drop of tea after the parade, which they did.

 

            ‘Give us a song, Sarah,’ said one, and she was happy to oblige, responding to the good-natured challenge to ‘sing an Orange one - if you know one!’  She did.  In fact she knew several, and she readily performed The Aghalee Heroes, followed by Dolly’s Brae, and then told them she wouldn’t let them out of her house until she had taught them Kevin Barry!

 

            When Tommy was a lad he was in the choir and was smitten with a sore throat.  This occasioned a visit from the Canon, a man of great self-importance with a habit of enunciating his every word with great clarity and emphasis as if he were practising for an elocution exam.

 

            ‘The boy must see the doctor,’ he counselled Sarah in stentorian tones, ‘and if he says his tonsils must come out, why then, they must come out; and if he advises that they must stay in, then they must stay in.’

 

            We can picture the devilish twinkle in her eye as she responded pleasantly,

 

            ‘Ach, what odds, Canon, sure he can’t sing anyway.’

 

            She was modest about her celebrity, and knew that the crowds in Carnegie Hall were not for her: there’d be too many faces looking back at her, she said, and she was genuinely surprised at the extent of her reputation: ‘My name’s farther than my feet’ll ever take me,’ she remarked wryly to David Hammond; but it was always the songs she loved.

 

            Sarah continued singing to her dying day, and if in the latter times her memory faded a bit, it still retained the songs.  She might not remember what she had for her dinner - might have forgotten that she had eaten at all - but start her off on The Banks of the Callan and she would give it to you word for word.  There is a heart-warming vignette of her lying in hospital, near the end of her life, when she spotted two of her grandchildren coming to visit.  She decided that she had better lay off the oul’ songs and sing something a bit more modern for them.  It being 1983 it was the most natural thing in the world to choose - Alexander’s Ragtime Band!

 

            Tommy Makem remembers her as a woman of great humanity who was always in good form, and admits that had it not been for the interest shown by outsiders, he himself might not have recognised what a legacy had been gifted to his family.  It is always thus with the Irish.  We come from the seed of a people that were beaten into the clay and do not always value our heritage until someone tells us it’s acceptable to do so.  Sarah sang love songs and romantic ballads, but many of her songs grew out of local incidents, or were songs of loss, poverty, and harsh experience; desolation, occupation, and want, many with roots that could be traced back four hundred years or more; and there was a time when we as a nation wanted to forget these things and move on.  Now we understand that these experiences made us what we are today, and we finally have enough self-belief to celebrate them for what they are: a record of a people in the making.  A colleague of mine who remembers Sarah sums it up:

 

            ‘When we were young we thought people like Sarah were daft for singing those old songs, but sure it’s easy to sing the songs that everybody likes.  What Sarah did was to go on singing the old songs when there was nobody to appreciate them.’

 

            Thankfully that has changed, and she is beginning to get the credit she deserves, but full recognition is still a while off.  William Kirk is studied in local primary schools; Baroness May Blood is on the curriculum of women’s studies in the USA.  Maybe it’s time we had more than a plaque on a wall or a street named after Sarah.  Maybe it’s time for a Sarah Makem Summer School to celebrate the importance of the song tradition in preserving our links to the past, so that we might face the future with new confidence.

 

 

 

*****

 

                                   
THE  PARTING (excerpt)                              

 

 

I thought she followed hill and star

 

And the song full in her head

 

Into a springtime later

 

We stood at the parting bed,

 

Watching death in love with her,

 

Her white face, her whiter hair,

 

And thought a tune began to seep,

 

Watching the eye’s far spill,

 

Watched the eyelids flicker and fall

 

As they fell on her first sleep.

 

 

            from The Parting, in Thirty-Two Meditations, by Peter Makem,

 

                                    reproduced by kind permission of the author.

 

 

*****
APPENDIX

 

 

The Big Pike

 

 

Jimmy Murphy was from Scotstown in County Monaghan, a shoemaker by trade, not a cobbler like Dick Darby so memorably immortalised by Tommy Makem, but a man who would make you a pair of shoes instead of just mending them.

 

            ‘I was up at Clay Lake one day about five years ago, fishing off the low ramper,’ he told his audience, ‘and I thought I would try for the big pike.’

 

            Now, as everybody knows, there is at least one big fish in every lough in Ireland that consistently defeats the efforts of the most skilled fishermen to catch it.

 

            ‘Begod, didn’t I hook the boyo,’ said Jimmy, ‘and him and me fought it out, but I could see I was getting nowhere.  As luck would have it, who came along but the Fizzer Coyle, and I shouted at him to come and give me a hand.  Between the two of us we got him out onto dry land, and I’ll tell you no word of a lie, the level of the water dropped by about twelve inches. 

 

            ‘But he wasn’t for giving in, and divil a bit of him could we kill, but just then we spotted Frank McQuaid who was out for a day’s hunting, and says I, ‘Frank, you may shoot him.’

 

            ‘I will,’ says Frank, ‘but I wouldn’t like to damage him too much for he’s a fine specimen,’ so he goes and gets a lock of haws out of the hedgerow and loads them into the gun instead of shot, and blasts yer man in the forehead.  We thought he was done for, and were standing there congratulating ourselves, when he gives a flick of his tail and back he goes into the water with a mighty splash.’

 

            Everyone agreed that this was a most unfortunate end to the whole affair and Jimmy was inclined to agree.

 

            ‘But I haven’t given up,’ he stated.  ‘I might catch him yet.’

 

            ‘He would hardly still be around, Jimmy,’ ventured one.

 

            ‘Oh he is surely.  I was out fishing off the low ramper only the other day when I heard a great commotion, and I looks over, and what d’ye think I saw?’

 

            No one could guess.

 

            ‘A fine big thorn bush going swimming down the middle of the lake,’ he told them.

 

 

 

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