Up the Rebel songs! We shouldn't be ashamed to sing about our past, says Jimmy Crowley

THE first time I met The Wolfe Tones was back stage at Fr Mathew Hall about 1968 where our band, The Diehards, opened for them.

Mick Harris, one of our trio, had an extraordinary steel mandolin whence the sound literally tumbled in rich cascades of minstrelsy.

It was the loudest instrument any of us had ever heard. We asked Derek Warfield about it and, said he, in a fierce Dublin accent: “I’d swear ’tis Chi-an-aze.” We found out later it wasn’t Chinese at all but an American dobro mandolin.

My next encounter with the Tones was for another support gig in Killarney about seven years ago. Derek had moved on and formed his new ensemble.

I was dreading the gig, being, as I thought, an incongruous cove caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the bobs were good.

I particularly dreaded what megafeks the Tones’ sound engineer was likely to magic on to my instruments and to my voice. I only had 20 seconds to try to impart to him my basic needs. “Put a bit a’ middle on me voice,” says I, “and give me a drop a’ reverb. Please put a bit a’ bottom on the bouzouki and a wee touch a’ reverb on the Spanish.”

I have succumbed to the horrors of many sound engineers in my longish career, but I reckon the Tones’ guy got me the best live sound ever with a minimum of fuss.

Recently, I was asked how I felt about the The Wolfe Tones on TG4. The show was about a terrific East Cork Jacobite song, Ross Catha na Mumhan (The Munster War Cry) and the poet from Knockadoon who made it, Piaras Mac Gearailt. The dogs of the road, those of them who aren’t tone deaf, know that Come Out Ye Black And Tans is literally distilled from the same melody. But so is Lady Keith’s Lamentation!

I replied with as much tact and diplomacy as I could muster.

In post-modern Ireland, I responded, the ubiquitous tones, modes and nuances of the Anglo-American are shouting at our children from every supermarket, elevator, smartphone, bus and charabanc. Without censure.

While one would expect this to put paid to all indigenous Irish accents, it somehow does not. The sweet old brogue seems to prevail.

Well, it seems to me, I continued, that in such a scenario, hearing The Wolfe Tones’ songs is about the last chance for Irish teenagers and young adults to hear fellow Irishmen sing in broad inner-city Dublin accents. The last echo of historical events and feelings too that seem to make so many of the engineers of the current culture uncomfortable.

In fact, The Wolfe Tones are fulfilling the role that Irish teachers, both secondary and primary, were thrilled to discharge in the ’50s and ’60s. Why have we grown to hate valour, fraternity and pride? Do we think these emotions should be confined to sport alone?

Many of us in the folk scene, myself included, have sprayed a sinister shower of cynicism on the Tones. Maybe the crop-dusting has gone on long enough and it’s time to understand the context.

The Tones have a reputation for ‘getting any crowd going’. I was taken one night years ago to their Dublin residency by my manager. His plan was to show me how to get ‘any crowd going’.

“See that lethargic crowd over by the men’s jacks?” he asked me. “Watch them! They haven’t been wound up yet!”

The Rebels miraculously shunted the fervour and bonhomie that had gripped 70% of the crowd and I stared incredulously at the way they literally swept the rebel dust over to the slow-coaches.

From the emergence of the printing press, Irish nationalism has recruited curiously from three unlikely bedfellows: the English language, the political street ballad, and more importantly, printing itself.

The political songs that floated Daniel O’Connell’s amazing success have all but commandeered the street broadsheets of the 19th century. With the exception of execution ballads and emigrant songs, songs that proclaimed aspirations for freedom, the rights of man and self-determination have dominated the printed ballad.

I heard Bertie Ahern say on the radio of late that if a United Ireland does materialise, we might have to quit singing rebel songs. He has failed to suss the difference between ‘proclamation’ and ‘commemoration’ rebel songs.

The first genre, a calling of the people to arms, could be misconstrued as rousers; the second, simply commemorating the fallen, has titles like The Boys Of Barr na Sráide or The Ballycannon Boys. No worthy Unionist is going to complain about that in an accommodated democracy.

Nor do I know one Republican who would decry fallen Orange-men being remembered with dignity.

Look at the fervour with which other countries embrace their rebel songs! Where would Somalia be without the album Freedom Songs Of The Somalia Republic? What about the epic anti-Ottoman songs of the Serbs with their bold bandit rebels? Or the cause of West Papua against Indonesian rule?