Irish Things that are Actually British: Flashback Friday!

Professor Buzzkill seems to want to make enemies in this episode. He shows that many things central to Irish culture and identity are actually British in origin -- St. Patrick, “the craic,” and “Danny Boy” come under his withering analytical gaze. But he may surprise you with the ultimate conclusions he reaches. Maybe he’s not that much of a buzzkill after all.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
This is Teddy Roosevelt, just back from charging up San
Juan Hill. Damn it, Professor Buzzkill.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Was already at the top, collecting historical evidence, busting myths,
and taking names. I have to admit that he's a
woody competitor and a damn fine rough rider. Join me
in listening to this episode. It's sure to be bully.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
It's getting to be mid March and all good Buzzkillers'
minds turned towards things Irish. We've done shows before on
Saint Patrick and on the Irish Slaves myth, and of
course they were quite serious shows and brought up important
historical issues and themes. But this March we thought we'd
be a little more lighthearted, yet probably generate more comment

(01:00):
and hate mail than our other Irish episodes. That's because
I want to bring up an intriguing aspect of Irish history,
the nature of Irish identity and the strength of the
belief in Irish identity. So I should apologize in advance
to the entire Irish side of the Buzzkiller dynasty, to

(01:23):
all of Irish America, and to many of my favorite
Buzzkillers in Ireland, especially especially Farmer Michael and his lovely
wife Kathleen. They'll be sure to give me both barrels
after they've heard this episode. I want to talk about
three quintessentially Irish things that are actually British, and I'll

(01:50):
save my rants about conceptions of national identities and the
fluidity of such national identities for the end of the show.
Now let's start at the very top. You can't get
much more Irish than Saint Patrick, the patron Saint of Ireland.
He was born, however, in Britain, around the fifth century AD.
Accounts differ from eighty four sixty to eighty four ninety three.

(02:13):
He was born to an aristocratic Christian family with a townhouse,
a country villa, and plenty of slaves, but Patrick professed
no real interest in Christianity as a young boy. At sixteen, however,
his world turned. He was kidnapped and sent overseas to
ten sheep as a slave in the chilly, mountainous countryside

(02:37):
of Ireland for seven years. It was, by his own account,
a pretty horrible life, but he had a religious conversion
while he was there, or religious intensification, and he became
a very deeply believing Christian. Now, according to folklore, a

(02:59):
voice came to Patrick in his dreams, telling him to escape,
and he found passage on a pirate ship back to Britain,
where he was reunited with his family. The voice, the
same voice of that dream voice, then later told him
to go back to Ireland. According to Patrick's own confessions,

(03:20):
that's the title of his sort of very very short
autobiography quote. I saw a man coming, as it were,
from Ireland. His name was Victoricous, and he carried many
letters and gave me one of them. I read the
heading the Voice of the Irish. As I began the letter,

(03:43):
I imagine in that moment that I heard the voice
of those very people who were near the Wood of Falklet,
which is beside the Western Sea, and they cried out,
as with one voice, we appeal to you, holy servant boy,
to come and walk among us. Patrick got ordained as

(04:04):
a priest from a local bishop, and he went back
and spent the rest of his life trying to convert
the Irish Christianity, and that his work in Ireland was tough.
He was constantly beaten up by thugs, he was harassed
by the Irish Royalty at the time, and he was
admonished by his British superiors at home. Look, how come
you're not converting more souls? How come it isn't going faster? Didn't, however,

(04:28):
ban the snakes from Ireland didn't get rid of the snakes.
As the famous legend has it, You'll have to listen
to our Saint Patrick episode to hear the full story
about that. And after he died on March seventeenth, four
sixty one, Patrick was largely forgotten, but slowly mythology grew
up around him and the idea of him and the

(04:48):
history of him, and centuries later he was honored as
the patron Saint of Ireland. Moving to slightly more recent times,
I want to talk about something called crack. Not the
drug that you're thinking about, but cric, one of the
words most closely connected to Ireland and Irish culture, particularly

(05:10):
Irish socializing. It generally means to have fun, especially with
a group of friends in a circle, joking around and
enjoying an evening out. It's often used informally to refer
to spontaneous fun or enjoyment, especially when trying to convince
someone to come out and join the group. Oh, I
think I'll stay in tonight. There's nothing much going on,

(05:32):
I'll come on out with us just for the crack.
It's used in anticipation of how an event or gathering
will go. The crack will be mighty. And of course
people rate the quality of an evening based on the crack.
The crack was ninety, meaning that it was fantastic. The
Irish have a healthy skepticism towards exaggeration and would never

(05:56):
say that an evening out was one hundred percent perfect.
Ninety is very high on the Irish scale. But you
know what I'm going to say, buzz killers. The origins
of crack are actually English, not Irish. Crack crack is

(06:16):
an Old English word meaning loud conversation or bragging talk.
It comes from the Middle English word crack crak, and
it was used in England, particularly Northern England and Scotland
for centuries to refer to energized talking, again usually in
a group, but by the early nineteenth century it was

(06:39):
also used to mean gossip or the latest news, or
sometimes it was just used in a greeting chat conversation, news, gossip,
the crack. That's how it was used in Northern England
and Scotland in the nineteenth century perhaps some of you
buzz killers will know the eighteen fifties song The Work

(07:02):
of the Weavers, not because you were from the eighteen fifties,
but because it became very popular later on. The Work
of the Weavers starts off essentially by saying singing, We're
all met together here to sit and to crack, and
it was popular, popular song and important in the twentieth
century folk song movement. Versus Lee Hayes, Ronnie Gilman, Pete

(07:25):
Seeger and Frank Hellman formed the Weavers of Folks singing group,
partly inspired by the song's title. So how did crack
become Irish then? Well, socio linguists have traced it as
moving from Scotland to Ulster, the northeastern province of Ireland,

(07:45):
in the mid twentieth century. It was still spelled crac
k in the fifties and sixties, but as it migrated
to the rest of Ireland by the late nineteen sixties
and seventies, it was gaalicized into crack cr ai c
and has become one of the words most closely connected

(08:06):
with Irish social culture over the same period. That is,
you know, in the mid to late twentieth century, it
faded out of usage more or less in England and Scotland,
and by the late twentieth century crack was so thoroughly
Irish that it began to creep back into English usage,

(08:27):
especially among young people in Britain, but using the Irish
spelling and the Irish meaning crack craic. And finally, I
want to talk about Danny Boy, the subject of the
quote national unquote origins of perhaps that most famous of

(08:47):
Irish songs, Danny Boy is almost certain to set people
off again. All hate mail should be directed to info
at professor Buzzkill dot com. Danny Boy was written in
the English town of Bath by the English lyricist Frederick
Weatherley in nineteen ten. It fit in with the romantic

(09:12):
ballad or air tradition singing in air if you know
what I mean that was prevalent in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, and became particularly singable when Weatherly's sister
sent him the sheet music for the London Dairy Air,
which was a tune from the nineteenth century, and Weatherlely

(09:33):
adapted his lyrics to better fit that tune. He had
originally written it to another tune, but the melody of
the London Dairy Air was better, so he adapted the
lyrics to fit it. That's the song we know today.
The lyrics to Danny Boy do not refer to Ireland
or any place in Ireland, or any place in Scotland

(09:55):
or Wales. The song could have been set almost anywhere
in the Celtic world, since, particularly the word Glenn from
Glenn to Glenn in the opening verse is as much
Scottish as it is Irish. Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes.
The pipes are calling from Glen to Glen and down

(10:17):
the mountain side. Not only that, whether they's original intent
seems to have been for the song to be sung
by a young woman to a young man, saying goodbye
for whatever reason, and yearning for the time when he
will return, and fitting with the tragic tone heard in

(10:38):
so many ballads of the time, the young girl refers
to the possibility that she will have died by the
time he gets back. But when you come and all
the flowers are dying, if I am dead, and as dead,
I well may be an on you know the words.
We're not entirely certain that Weatherly insisted that the song

(11:03):
be sung by a woman but early sheet music of
Danny Boy often said that the phrase iley deer should
replace Danny Boy when it is sung by a man,
So the song is to ile deer, coming from the
male perspective. And yet the song seems to have been

(11:23):
given a different interpretation by the mid twentieth century. Rather
than a plaintive ballad sung by a broken hearted young woman,
it's often thought to be apparent singing to a son
who's leaving Ireland because of the famine, or because of work, migration,
or some other reason that drove the Irish diaspora, especially

(11:45):
to North America. And we'll play Danny Boy in a minute.
But this brings me to my conclusion to my historian
rant against the claims of the purity of national identity
and the national origin of many aspects of cultures. Despite
what the supposed genetic studies of your DNA by twenty

(12:06):
three and meters and ancestry dot com might tell you
about the specific geographic origins of your ancestors, press is
few things that we characterize as Irish or American or
any other nationality come down to us through the ages
untouched by other cultures. Sure you say this is obvious

(12:30):
for relatively new countries like the United States, but ancient
cultures such as the Irish culture in Europe, go way
way back. They must be different, they must be more pure.
But even the most obvious cultural identifier, language is almost
never pure. And nowhere is this more obvious than in

(12:50):
the historical languages of the islands of Britain and Ireland,
ancient Celtic, Norse, Saxon, Germanic, Latin, and Romance language. Jesus
have flowed over and those islands, flowed through those people
and led to many blends and hybrids that we have nowadays.
So let me leave you then with the first recording

(13:11):
of Danny Boy, which is dated to nineteen seventeen. It
was recorded by Ernestine Schumann Heink, who was born in
Czechoslovakia of German Bohemian ancestry and became a popular American
operatic singer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
So we have a Czech Bohemian, German American singing an

(13:34):
English air to a tune of probable Irish origin that
can refer to almost any part of northwestern Celtic Europe.
But that has almost all of us weeping in our
beer at its Beauty and multiple meetings. Talk to you

(13:54):
next week.

Speaker 4 (14:00):
My Sun from the lend On about the Monton School,
the Somber School, Onland School, did you school on conlib

(14:34):
so forty.

Speaker 1 (14:36):
School?

Speaker 4 (14:38):
All on it? A final short all the Hello, This

(15:13):
is Antonia Buzzkill.

Speaker 2 (15:14):
Please support my daddy by going.

Speaker 3 (15:17):
To Professorbuzskill dot com.

Speaker 4 (15:19):
And clicking on the Patreon button.

Speaker 2 (15:22):
While you're there, subscribe to his email list and shop
the Buzzkill bookshelf.

Speaker 4 (15:29):
Follow him on Facebook, on Twitter at buzzkillprof and on
Instagram at professor Buzzkill. Professor Buzzkill is part of Entertainment
One's podcast network and is available on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
Google Play, and all major podcast apps.

Speaker 2 (15:51):
Please leave a review while you're there.

Speaker 4 (15:54):
Thanks for listening.