I got an email last week that I sat with for two days before I could answer it. A woman in Birr, not far from here, whose father had died. He used to sing in our direction of the world, the back rooms and the kitchens, and she wanted to know what people sing at these things. What's "right". She'd been to the funeral home and nobody could tell her, and somebody, God love them, pointed her at a fan site for a song about a bog.
So. This one is not the usual carry-on. No CAPS today, mostly. Let me tell you what I know, which is more than I'd like to.
The first thing — and I wish somebody had told ME this years ago — is that there is no "right" song. There's the song HE sang. There's the one that was on in the car. The one your mother hummed doing the dishes. That's the one. People go looking for the correct funeral song the way you'd look for the correct tie, and it doesn't work like that. The song that's right is the one that makes the room go quiet because everyone in it remembers the same person singing it.
Right. Now. The actual songs.
The Parting Glass is the one. If there's a default, it's that. "Of all the money that e'er I had, I spent it in good company." It's a leaving song, not a death song, which is exactly why it works — it's a man saying goodnight to a room full of people he loves and won't see for a while. Soft. It doesn't shout. The trick with it, and I'm telling you this as someone who has fallen apart in the middle of it more than once, is that you do NOT sing it for yourself. You sing it for the room. The minute you start feeling it in your own chest you're gone. Look at a candle, look at the back wall, look at anything that isn't a face you love, and let the words do the carrying. They will. That song has been carrying people for two hundred years. It can carry you for four minutes.
Then there's Danny Boy. I have opinions here. Half the country will tell you it's a cliché, that it's not even properly Irish (the words are by an English barrister, the tune is the old Londonderry Air, it's a whole tangled thing and I wrote about it elsewhere). And they're not wrong. But here's the thing — clichés are clichés because they WORK. When you're standing in a cold church and an old fella you've known your whole life opens his mouth and gives you "the pipes, the pipes are calling," it doesn't matter one bit who wrote it. It does the job. It empties the room out, in the good way. Don't let anyone shame you out of it.
After those two it opens up. Carrickfergus, if your man was from the north or just loved a good cry. "I'm sick now, my days are numbered" — God. The Fields of Athenry gets sung at a lot of them now, though that's a more recent one and I'll not put it in the songbook for the usual reasons (it's still in copyright, lads, I keep telling you). Be Thou My Vision if the family's churchy. And the local one, whatever it is — every parish has the song that only gets aired at funerals, and nobody outside the parish has heard it, and it's the most important one in the world for the length of that afternoon.
Here's the part the woman in Birr really asked, underneath the asking. How do you actually get through it. The mechanics of it.
You don't do it alone. That's the main one. A funeral song should never be a solo if you can help it — you start it, and you let the room come in under you, and when your voice goes (it will go) the room holds the note while you breathe. That's what a wake is FOR. It's not a performance. Nobody is grading you. If you stop halfway and somebody else picks it up, that's not a failure, that's the whole point of singing together instead of one at a time. We learn songs in company so that company can finish them for us.
Pick the key low. People always pitch funeral songs too high because they're nervous and nerves push the voice up. Start it lower than feels right. You want room above you for when it gets to the big bit, and you want it to sound like talking, not like a recital.
And — this is the bit I really wanted to say — it is allowed to be a bit of a mess. The cracked voice IS the song at a funeral. The man who can't quite finish The Parting Glass tells you more about the love in that room than any clean tenor ever could. Don't aim for nice. Aim for true.
If you want to learn one before you need it — and you will need it, that's just the arithmetic of being alive — start with the lyrics and learn The Parting Glass off by heart now, while nobody's died. Learn it doing the washing-up. Then it's in you, ready, and you're not reading words off your phone at the worst moment of someone's year.
We sing the cumulative songs here, the daft happy ones, the bog and the tree and the flea, because they're about life piling up, one thing on another thing, the whole green world adding to itself. The funeral songs are the same songs facing the other way. Same tradition. Same kitchen. Same idea that you don't have to carry the hard things on your own, that's why there's more than one of us in the room.
To the woman in Birr — I'm so sorry about your dad. Sing the one he sang. You'll know it when you reach for it.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — My own father went in 2011 and we sang The Parting Glass over him in a small church in Ennis and I did not get through it and that was grand. Rattlin sat on my lap the whole evening after, which she does when she knows, the cat. She always knows.