Music Heals and Saves
On St. Patrick, The Pogues, a shipwreck, and an Irish girl
Most people think St. Patrick’s Day is about green beer and shamrocks.
It isn’t.
Before he was a Saint, Patrick was Romano-British.
Around 400 AD, Irish raiders dragged him across the sea and sold him into slavery. He spent six years tending sheep on a cold hillside.
Until he escaped.
And then he went back.
He went back to the people who enslaved him because he believed they had souls worth saving.
A belief in the redeemable nature of rough people.
That distinction is everything.
And it echoes across fifteen centuries with
the song “The Irish Rover.
Watch that video long enough and you understand something.
These are men for whom music is not a career.
It’s the only thing standing between them and total dissolution.
You can see it in MacGowan’s face
Eyes half-closed, gone somewhere else entirely, singing a song about catastrophe with the joy of a man who has been saved by the act of singing it.
The music has healing power.
It allows the soul of some hardened individuals to shine.
The song itself is a Irish tragedy told as comedy:
“On the Fourth of July 1806
We set sail from the sweet Cove of Cork
We were sailing away with a cargo of bricks
For the Grand City Hall in New York”
A cargo of bricks. For a city hall. On the Fourth of July. The whole American Dream compressed into one image…
these men are bringing the raw materials of civilization to the New World, and they believe in it completely.
It doesn’t end well.
“We had sailed seven years when the measles broke out
And the ship lost its way in the fog
And that whole of a crew was reduced down to two
Just meself and the captain’s old dog”
Seven years. Measles. Fog. Two survivors.
This is not a story about arrival. It’s a story about loss told with such velocity and ferocity that somewhere along the way it becomes something else.
The Irish Rover is a song about failure.
But no one who has ever heard it feels like a loser.
Sunday Night. Hollywood. The 98th Academy Awards.
A 36-year-old woman from Kerry, Ireland walked to the stage at the Dolby Theatre and became the first Irish woman in the history of the Academy to win Best Actress.
Jessie Buckley.
Playing Agnes Shakespeare
wife of William, mother of Hamnet, a woman history buried in a footnote.
A woman who watched her son die and screamed a scream that wasn’t in the script.
She told the Hollywood Reporter: “In the third take, that scream just came out.”
She thanked her husband.
She told her baby daughter Isla that this was kind of a big deal.
She dedicated the win to “the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart.”
It was Mother’s Day in the United Kingdom.
And today’s it’s St Patrick’s Day
And then, right before she walked off stage, she stopped.
“Go raibh maith agaibh, slán.”
Thank you very much.
Goodbye.
In Irish Gaelic.
The Irish arrived and did good.
Patrick came back for them.
They sailed broken ships to New York with a cargo of bricks and a song.
MacGowan sang the wreckage from the inside out.
And Sunday night, a girl from Kerry said thank you in the old tongue.
This is what St. Patrick’s Day is actually about.
Not luck.
Not green.
Not corned beef.
Keep finding the soul in the hardened thing.
Carry the impossible weight with something that looks, from the outside, almost like joy.
The soul of a hard people keeps finding ways to shine.
Sláinte.
Make it a powerful day
Eric