Ronnie Drew travels here from Dollymount Strand to Van Diemen's Land and
with an almost comparable sweep from the old time beggarman happy on the
Irish roads to the Old Triangle by the prison on the banks of the Royal
Canal. He sings of the Irish Rover, that fabulous ship, and of that
fabulous man, Jim Larkin; of Finnegan's Wake (the original one and with
the apostrophe), of the fabulous running-dog. Master McGrath, and of
O'Casey's Red Roses and love on a day's outing from Dublin.
But he has always been a lot more than just a rambling, roving singer, no
simple wandering minstrel he, and the force and sincerity of his style as
a singer of social protest will need no introduction to those who have
admired him on his own or, in the past, with the Dubliners. From that
point of view three of the songs on this disc are remarkable and will be
completely new to the majority of listeners.
He is at home completely with the humors of
Dublin in Heno Magee's, "Jem".
"Do you remember Jem, when we first stepped out?
You'd a pinstriped suit and wouldn't open your mouth.
But you really looked lovely except your shirt was sticking out,
Do you remember Jem?
Do I remember? Will I ever forget?
It's a simple Dublin love-story, beginning forty years back and still
going strong but made more-or-less epical by such moments as when the
groom put the whiskey in Gran's stout and the old lady was found asleep
in the bridal bed. But it has also a considerable value as social
history: this is the way many Dubliners lived and were happy.
From that Dublin Ronnie moves off to the rough country of the underground
workers across the water: building England up and tearing England down.
It is a brutal parable about the world we live in: the young Limerick man
built into the concrete in the tunnel, the gas main that blew Paddy Yates
off the ground, the carrier who swore he'd set the world on fire and
almost did so, beginning with himself, when his shovel cut through a
high-tension wire. None of them, the song sings, will ever get an O.B.E.
and that comment has a dark Swiftian mastery about it. Most of us are
already familiar with Ronnie singing of MacAlpine's Fusiliers.
And in
Ian Campbell's song,
"The Old Man", the singer circles the
globe and nowhere finds peace. The old man's father fought the Boers
while his wife brought up the family on charity. The old man himself
fought and was gassed in Flanders and, after that war, was out in the
general strike.
Later he saw Mosley's men on the march and then his son had to go out to
fight Hitler. His daughter, a land-girl, married a Yank and, as the song
ends, his grandson is on the way to Vietnam.
There's not one of us who doesn't know a similar story about the total
mismanagement of the world, but as it is here written and sung, it
strikes home with a shattering effect.
These are songs to think about and Ronnie Drew is the man to sing them.
Benedict Kiely
