Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers

Chapter 6. Shared Traditions: Irish and Appalachian Ballads and Whiskey Songs

122 Chapter 6 SHARED tRADItIoNS Irish and Appalachian Ballads and Whiskey Songs Emily Kader o ne of the most contentious debates within southern studies is whether Scotch-Irish settlers within the region can be considered “Celtic.” Grady McWhiney, in his book Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South, argues that Ulster Scots immigrants carried various “Celtic” traits and practices that led to a distinctive southern culture. While McWhiney’s study contains some good information, its thesis and analysis are too heavily burdened by a desire to define the “ethnic background of white southerners” as Celtic and thus a distinct cultural group oppressed by the Anglo-Saxon descendants of the North (2). His idea of the “conflict between the English and the Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles” (7), which he attempts to transplant to the United States, is a romantic notion that this essay rejects.1 Discussions of Celtic ethnicity, in either the southern United States or the British Isles, are often fruitless within the political contexts of both geographical locations. What interests me is the movement of folk texts across cultural and political boundaries in Ireland and the arrival and persistence of these texts in the southern Appalachian Mountains. If the twentieth-century descendants of Protestant Ulster Scots immigrants in Appalachia sing songs also sung by twentieth-century Catholic populations across Ireland, then Irish folk song can be identified as a shared tradition between the two culturally and religiously different groups. This essay examines two strains of Appalachian music, the ballad (or narrative folk song) and the whiskey song, and argues that Irish influences cannot be discarded when considering the roots of these traditions. Irish and Appalachian Ballads and Whiskey Songs 123 • • • Donald H. Akenson begins his study of cultural difference in Ireland by summing up the obvious: “one of the things that everyone knows is that Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants were, and are, fundamentally different from each other” (3). Akenson’s tone is ironic, as his study delineates how such attitudes constitute “a mass of folk beliefs about the differences between Protestants and Catholics,” which he proves to be false. He concludes that there is “no empirically verifiable evidence that cultural factors caused a differentiation between the two religions.” He then poses two questions: “How was it possible to keep apart these two such similar groups of people ? Why did they not blur together?” (108–109). Rodger Cunningham argues that they did blur together and identifies the hybrid culture of Ulster, Lowland Scotland, and northern England as a “transitional territory [that] has been subject to population movements in both directions for a millennia ” (67). Such studies have troubled what “everybody knows” about cultural borders in Northern Ireland before the political differences of nationalism and loyalism held sway. The musical traditions of the Appalachian region, which show influences from both Irish and British song, offer us some evidence that Protestant immigrants shared and exchanged folk traditions with their Catholic neighbors before leaving for America. Folk songs of Irish origin appear in Appalachia, and ballads from the region are rife with references to Ireland. In The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore there are a number of songs that are easily identifiable as Irish, including “Rose Connolly,” which D. k. Wilgus argues has exclusively Irish origins (White 248).2 Brown includes “William Riley” (White 363), a song of widespread popularity in Ireland,3 as well as “Pretty Susie, the Pride of kildare”4 (White 369) and “Three Leaves of Shamrock”5 (White 370). other songs in the volume contain Irish localizations, such as “John Reilley,” where a sailor returns home to “a young Irish lady” (White 305–306),6 and “Barney McCoy,” where the singer tells his lover, Nora, to “Bid your friends and old Ireland goodbye” (White 346).7 There are also a number of songs listed that are solidly established in both British and Irish traditions, such as “The Gypsy Laddie” (White 161–168).8 But Brown rejects the possibility of Irish origins for these songs and instead prefers to suggest English or Scottish source claims for Appalachian material. of “Pretty Susie, the Pride of kildare,” he 124 Emily Kader writes, “This presumably Irish ballad has become a folk song of a sort in England” (White 368), thereby dismissing the possibility that the song arrived in the Appalachian region via Ireland. Scholars of Appalachian folk song who assume that the majority of...