Right, so. I've been putting off this one for years and I'll tell you why. Carrickfergus frightens me a bit. Not in a ghost way. In a "I don't fully understand it and it makes me cry anyway" way.
You know the song. Everybody half-knows it. That's actually the whole point of what I want to say today.
Most folk songs, when you go digging into them, you find a story. A printed broadside, a fella who wrote it down in 1840-something, a tune borrowed off another tune. There's a thread you can pull. Carrickfergus has no thread. Carrickfergus is a knot.
Here's what we more-or-less know, and I'm going to be honest about how much of it is "more-or-less." The song as we sing it today — the wishing-I-was-in-Carrickfergus one — got pulled together in the middle of the 20th century. The version most people have in their heads owes an awful lot to a recording by the actor Peter O'Toole, of all people, who recited a fragment to the composer Seán Ó Riada, who passed it to Dominic Behan, who shaped it. So already we're three or four hands deep before it even reaches the version your nan hummed at the sink. That's not a clean origin. That's a rumour that learned to sing.
But go back further and it gets stranger still. Underneath the English song there's an older Irish-language one, a thing sometimes called Do Bhí Bean Uasal — "There Was a Noblewoman" — a drinking-and-loving song, a bit bawdy in places, nothing like the soft farewell we know. The melody is shared. Some of the imagery floated over. And somewhere in the crossing from Irish into English, lines got carried like silt in a river, settling in places that don't quite make sense.
And that, lads, is the secret of why Carrickfergus feels like a dream.
Because the lyrics don't add up. They genuinely don't. The singer wishes he was in Carrickfergus. Grand. Then suddenly he's talking about Ballygrand. Then the seas are too wide to swim. Then — out of NOWHERE — "but the sea is wide and I cannot swim over, and neither have I the wings to fly." Then he's drunk in some far city. Then he's an old man, his wandering days are over, "and all the comrades that e'er I had, they're sorry for my going away." It lurches. It skips whole years between verses. Geography that shouldn't connect connects.
People assume that's bad songwriting. I think it's the opposite. I think we're hearing the seams of a translation that nobody ever smoothed out, and the seams are the most beautiful part. It feels like memory works. You don't remember your life in order either. You get a harbour, a face, a feeling of being too far from home, and your wandering days being over — and the connective tissue is just GONE.
I sang it once at a funeral. A man named Tom, played the box for forty years at the same session in Ennis. His daughter asked for Carrickfergus and I nearly said no because I knew I'd not get through it. And here's the gas thing — I forgot a verse. Stood there in front of everyone and lost a whole verse, and afterwards three different people told me my version was lovely. Because nobody knows the real order. Nobody knows the WHOLE thing. We all carry a slightly broken copy, and the breaks line up with grief in a way that no perfect song ever could.
That's what I mean when I say it's half-made of mistranslated Irish. The "mistakes" are load-bearing.
Now I'd put Carrickfergus in a very small club of songs that can end a night properly. The Parting Glass is the other big one, and they do different jobs. The Parting Glass is a deliberate goodbye, dignified, eyes open, glass raised. Carrickfergus is a man who can't get home and has stopped pretending he ever will. One says farewell. The other one just aches. If you're closing a session, know which weather you're in.
A word of warning if you're going to sing it. Don't dress it up. The temptation with a sad song is to pour on the vibrato and squeeze every note. Resist that, please, for the love of God. The power is in the plainness. Sing it like you're telling somebody something true and a bit embarrassing. Let the held notes be long but don't WAVE them about. And give the room a second of silence after the last line before anybody claps, because they will need it.
It'll be going in the songbook proper soon — you can browse the rest of the songs in the meantime, and there's a few other slow closers in there worth learning. But I wanted to write this part first, the part that isn't really history because the history barely exists. The part that's just me trying to explain why a song full of holes is one of the most complete things I know.
Carrickfergus is a real town, by the way. Up in Antrim, big Norman castle, lovely spot. I've been. And do you know — standing there, looking at the water, I didn't feel the song at all. The song isn't about the place. It never was. It's about not being able to get to the place. There's a difference, and the whole of Irish music lives in that difference.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — I tried singing it to Rattlin the cat to test the held notes and she left the room halfway through the second verse. Critic. She came back for the quiet bit at the end though, sat on my foot. So. Even the cat knows where the silence goes.