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Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: … but, when I do, it isn’t green

Published: March 17, 2013 1 minute 9 comments

Fmc130317
The Flying McCoys call out the Flaming Eejdits. Good on yez.

I can't tell you how much I hate St. Patrick's Day. 

But I can tell you that Patrick's official color is blue, not green, and that, until fairly recent years, his feast day was kept in rather subdued terms in Ireland. They've since learned from the Americans how to make money through wretched excess by joining in this annual Steppin McFetchit minstrel show.

BogsidersFor several years, back in the '80s, I was part of an Irish ballad group, together with another Yank and two Limerickmen (one of them absent from this pic).

Being in Colorado, we didn't get as many gigs as we'd have had in Boston or Philadelphia, where you have a larger and more active Irish community, but we were well-loved within the ex-pat community there, such as it was.

Once each year, however, on March 17, we'd get a larger gig, for which we had an informal rule that we'd play "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" and "Danny Boy" once each and then the rest of the night we'd do Irish music instead.

I remember another gig, too, when Notre Dame played Air Force in Colorado Springs and we were hired to play in the pool room at a Holiday Inn. I don't mean "billiards" but "swimming." We were set up in the broad area at one end of the room and the bar was set up in the broad area at the other end of the room, with the pool in the middle.

There was one fellow there in bright green shirt and bright green pants and bright green everything else and it was all I could do to restrain our whistle player, who kept suggesting that, on our next break, he could just walk past him and bump into him and knock him into the pool as if it were an accident.

It wasn't that I disagreed with his general take on things. I just doubted he'd be able to make it look like an accident, particularly since I was pretty sure which he would choose if it came down to either making it looking like an accident or ending up with a green-clad clown in the water.

And I remember one St. Patrick's where we found a large table plunked down right in front of the stage with a family of drunkards whose only interest in what we were doing was occasionally getting up and pretending to step dance, but who were otherwise content to shout back and forth and occasionally scream "Erin go bragh" and suchlike.

They were led in their revelry by a drunken old harridan who, thank the Lord, finally passed out and was taken out to sleep it off in the car, whereupon things quieted down and we could play to the rest of the crowd for a time.

After an hour of this respite, the proprietor came up with a tray of shots and asked after her, then told them to go bring her back in so she could enjoy some Bushmill's on the house. Which they did. Which she did. For as long as it stayed down.

And yet I still haven't told you how much I hate St. Patrick's Day.

Never mind.

The band broke up before there was inexpensive recording, which is a shame, because I think we were rather good, but have no record of it. However, a few years ago, I put together this YouTube playlist of songs we used to do, as done by other people, together with a blog entry with notes on each.

Later, I updated the list (first assembled from my individual links, I should note, by a Friend of That Blog who is now a Friend of This Blog) to eliminate some dead links.

I see now that a few of them have ads for which I apologize, but if you'd like some actual Irish music rather than the prevailing Irish-American music hall schmaltz, there it is.

March17The year after the band broke up, I approached a local bookstore/cafe and offered to play an unplugged solo gig for free on March 17 if they'd agree not to serve green beer or hand out plastic shamrocks, and we made it a benefit for the local food bank.

Not sure how much time it shaved from the stretch in Purgatory I had earned myself with those other St. Paddy's Day atrocities, but it was a very pleasant evening of good music and nice folks, and that counts for something.

And speaking of stereotypes and Poor Richard and Friends of the Blog, here's a little something from a fellow who'd be a much better guitarslinger than I ever was if he were also that Richard Thompson, but who does what he does pretty well anyways.

Rpa130314

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Comments 9

  1. Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Duit!

  2. In St. Patrick’s day, the Pagans’ logo was the snake. St. Patrick murdered the Pagans who refused to convert. This is how he rid Ireland of “the snakes.” I do not celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. I will, however, go to a good restaurant and have corned beef and cabbage. I will bring my widowed neighbor and then we will go food shopping.

  3. Ha! That’s a new one, and I thought I’d heard them all!
    The most violent conversion legend I’d heard was of the fellow who agreed to be baptized, so Patrick stuck his (steel tipped) crozier into the ground to free his hands, and performed the ceremony, after which he looked down and realized he’d accidentally stuck it through the poor fellow’s foot. “Why didn’t you say something?” he said, to which the fellow said, “I thought it was part of the ceremony!”
    In point of fact, of course, not only were the conversions quite nonviolent, but Patrick worked to record and preserve Brehon law. Part of that old culture was also the respect for women that allowed Bridget to be not simply a “helper” but a leader in the religious community that emerged. (Well, that didn’t last of course, but it was there in those days.)
    As for the snakes, the truth is less fun than the stories: They were never there in the first place, since the “Old Sod” is actually fairly new, having risen out of the ocean rather than breaking off from Pangea.

  4. Mike: the snakes may never have been there in the first place, but they’re gettin’ there now thanks to economics and the EU: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/world/europe/boom-over-st-patricks-isle-is-slithering-again.html?_r=0.
    Jan: your good restaurant must be in America (maybe Poor Richard’s if it’s still around) — I’ve never seen corned beef and cabbage on any Irish restaurant’s menu! That was kind of a disappointment, actually, but I learned to make do with lamb stew or salmon garnishing three kinds of potatoes, generally.

  5. Years and years ago, I read, “An Irish housewife uses corned beef because she knows anything bad that could happen to it already has. And she only cooks cabbage when she wants to annoy the neighbors!”
    I like your song list, Mr. Peterson. That was the kind of stuff I listened to at Matt Kane’s in the late ’70s. “I’ll take you home again,” by Mr. Crosby, was on the jukebox, but that was the only time I’d hear that kind of Irish music in that bar.

  6. Corned beef was beyond the budget of most poor Irish, but it was popular in this country, where it became a staple for Jiggs and Dinty Moore and the bluecollar Irish crowd, who, in turn, became the backbone of the folks seen in “The Last Hurrah,” which is the movie they ought to be showing today instead of “Finian’s Rainbow” and all that.
    The identification with St. Patrick’s Day likely comes from all the fundraisers held on that day and others, as the Irish Republican Brotherhood was finding its feet in the latter part of the 19th century. (Note that the Irish national anthem includes the lyrics: “Soldiers are we, whose lives are pledged to Ireland. Some have come from a land beyond the wave” — though the Canadians and Aussies are also included in that.)
    As Mr. Dooley said, “Be hivins, if Ireland cud be free by a picnic, it’d not on’y be free today, but an impire,” and, later,
    “Whin we wants to smash th’ Sassenach an’ restore th’ land iv th’ birth of some iv us to her thrue place among th’ nations, we gives a picnic. ‘Tis a dam sight asier thin goin’ over with a slug iv joynt powder an’ blowin’ up a polis station with no wan in it. It costs less; an’ whin ’tis done, a man can lep aboord a sthreet ca-ar, an’ come home to his family an’ sleep it off.”

  8. Bill Meek wrote a song that isn’t on YouTube but is called “The Lament of the Bard” and is about a farmer who gets recorded by an American folk music collector … and raised the issues of the folks I call “The Celtic Music Snots” who destroy it from the other side: “so if you’re givin’ them ‘the Blackbird,’ likewise ‘The Rocks o’ Bawn,’ you must forget a verse or three, and make sure your meter’s completely and teetotally all wrong, and, if you chance to vomit, with delight they’re surely swoon, and remember that each ethnic singer must sing out of tune.”

  9. Aha! So glad you’ve made an updated playlist! Bookmarked.

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