Dr. Richard Mc Mahon of the Department of History at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick introduces a fascinating new project that 'allows artists to engage with historical sources in grounded but creative ways'. Listen to Golden Streets, Bitter Tears by Adrian Crowley above.
Bring Your Own Hammer is a new project in which historians and composers collaborate to create song cycles that offer novel interpretations of historical sources.
It is rooted in the history of nineteenth-century Ireland and of the Irish Diaspora and involves leading composers, musicians and singers including Linda Buckley, Adrian Crowley, Eileen Gogan, Carol Keogh, Jah Wobble and James Yorkston and the late Cathal Coughlan, among others.
The composers work with professional historians to create new work and the collaboration aims to explore the boundaries of historical and artistic interpretation by reflecting upon and reimagining primary sources. The project launched this month with Golden Streets, Bitter Tears, a new song by Adrian Crowley.
The song is a poignant evocation of the idea of the sea journey as a means of escape from the poverty of nineteenth-century Ireland and, more generally, of the promise and perils of migration. America is ostensibly portrayed as a land of equality and freedom where the song’s narrator can ‘walk with the best of the town’ and he is freed from ‘misery chains’, with a juxtaposition of the liberty and opportunity in America and the restrictions of life in Ireland.
The enticing image of life ‘over the waves’ is, however, superbly undercut by the song’s refrain Golden Streets, Bitter Tears, suggesting all is not as it seems.
This refrain offers a compelling hint at what will be a key theme of the project; the promise and peril of the migrant sea journey and the often bitter consequences for many who sought to leave or, indeed, return. The song is inspired by migrant letters sent back to Ireland which offered an idealised image of life in the United States and the lyrics draw in part from the original letters and in part from the careful imaginings of the composer. In doing so, the song fulfils a central aim of the project, namely to allow artists to engage with historical sources in grounded but creative ways.
As Adrian Crowley notes about the process of creating the songs for the project:
"I found real-life stories. Stories of strife and resilience, stories of adversity and struggle, stories of longing and of poverty, stories of survival and failure, stories of misery and sadness, stories of minor triumph, stories of loss and disappointment, stories of the fields, stories of the shoreline, stories of the streets, stories of the workhouse, the prison yard, the courthouse, stories of hunger and yearning, stories of the open seas, stories of the human spirit. I felt enrapt by these figures of the past and what they lived through".
It is a near-perfect summation of the benefits of the project from an artist who has created such important work by engaging in historical research and aligning it so beautifully with the creative process.
Golden Streets, Bitter Tears by Adrian Crowley (featuring Brigid Mae Power) is out now on Dimple Discs - find out more about the Bring Your Own Hammer project here.
