Background to an sean-nós

 Sean-Nós songs can be two hundred or more years old. What is now a folk art is still practiced in all the Gaeltacht communities. It springs from an older tradition of the filí, the hereditary and professional poets of the highly regulated Gaelic civilization which prevailed through at least one thousand five hundred years of history, to the early seventeenth century. At its peak expansion around the 4th Century AD, a Gaelic world existed that stretched from modern-day Scotland in the north to the most southerly tip of Ireland, taking in the Western Isles and The Isle of Man, and its universe was divided for its own reference purposes into two, Gael and Gall.

 Crushed at last by Elizabethan England, the separate Gaelic polities made what lack accommodation they could with the reality of the conquest. But although the system which had supported the intellectual class or caste had failed, remnants of their art sank with those of that class who could not or would not flee to Europe, into the ranks of the increasingly oppressed people. There, as the wars and social turmoil of the seventeenth century gave way to the comparative peace of the eighteenth, many of the classical and aristocratic traits of Gaelic composition and performance were lost or adapted to the usages of a peasant existence.

 Many of the great sean-nós songs were composed by Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Century poets seeking to bolster the morale of their own people with the hope perhaps, of a Stewart restoration. Róisín Dubh on Mossie Scanlon's CD 'Téanam ort!' ('No Boundary') is often referred to as an example of this type of poem/song called in Irish, Aisling, meaning a 'vision'. Often the names of the authors were lost as the society that had nurtured them ebbed away. Ancient airs that were passed down from generation to generation would have been pressed into use for new songs and their practitioners were absorbed into the mass of the uneducated people, reduced to being 'hewers of wood and drawers of water' in their own country.

 Songs survived in much-thumbed manuscripts and by word of mouth, through an era when fewer and fewer Irish speakers could learn to read and write and those who did were more likely to do so in English rather than their own tongue. At a time when the great majority of people had little else by way of entertainment, a good song could tell the story of some event of local or national importance, a drowning, a faction fight, or some ancient battle. Well-known airs were adopted and changed and words were sometimes altered to suit local occurrences. Occasionally a song might comment obliquely on well-known personalities or tap into social problems such as the love of a wealthy farmer's daughter for an itinerant, an impossible match by all the norms of pre-Famine Irish society and a cultural taboo that survived in rural Ireland into the early Twentieth Century. A new verse or a borrowing from another song might be introduced if it fitted the story. This probably helped to enliven a song for listeners at the time but it has generated much discussion by later folklorists and collectors, determined to fix upon a 'definitive' version.

 It is sometimes said by way of complaint that songs from the traditional repertoire (apart from children’s and more light-hearted songs) tend to be slow and often quite long. Indeed it can take a little while for modern ears to appreciate them fully, but it is an acquired taste worth the cultivating for the 'hidden Ireland' it can disclose. Just as today we seem to enjoy a media diet of 'doom and gloom', people in earlier times also liked to have their emotions 'wrung out' so to speak, by a song. And of course these songs are usually interspersed with the liveliest jigs, reels and hornpipes in live performance. Anyone who has experienced an evening in a Gaeltacht pub when there are a few singers and musicians present and the house is throbbing from the set dancing, will know that a natural hush will settle over the crowd every now and again, whether from anticipation or mere exhaustion, and a call goes up for a song. A sean-nós song fits perfectly into such a setting.

Chris Mooney