I was born in a wilderness
In a jungle of brick and stone
In a dank and grimy canyon
Where each man stood alone.
I was reared in a fetid alley
In a criss-cross maze of lanes
Flanked by the toilers’ hovels
Which were coloured by misery stains;
Where the rain was icy needles
And the sun was a truant light
And the winter wind was knife-like
And the snow was never white
But slushed from the age-old shuffle
Of the time-battered boots of the poor,
Where most of the folk went hungry
And death was swift and sure.
But once in a while came a balladeer
Or a blink-a-blonk banjo man
Or a fiddlin’ fool with a resined bow
Begging pennies for his can;
Or a winsome lass with a carefree song
And a voice like rippling gold
Each note like a jewelled finger
That flicked away the cold
Though some of their tunes held sadness
And the echo of ancient wrongs
I could glimpse a kind of glory
In every one of their songs,
And when they sang of youthful love
My heart soared to the sky
And the damp grey walls of our alley
Never seemed half so high,
And the rain was a gentle moisture
And the wind was not so cold
And the sun would open its purse-strings
And squander its coins of gold.
“Let me make the ballads, and who will make the laws,” wrote Andrew Fletcher in 1703. Even before that date — and ever since with a mischievous disregard for both the laws of libel and the canons of poetry — Dubliners have been making ballads, ‘rec-im-itations’ and parodies, commenting in verse form on everything from social events, public affairs, the city’s monuments and institutions, politics, murder cases, sporting events, their fellow citizens and street ‘characters’, etc.
There was little that was news-worthy, topical — or sometimes even scurrilous and bawdy! — that escaped either the pens or the rough-and-ready ‘pomes’ of the early ballad-makers. For more than 200 years, right up until the twenties and thirties of the last century, the popular tunes and lampoons were sold on the streets of Dublin. “Latest songs, penny each!” … broadsheets of ballads and doggerel, crudely printed on single sheets of cheap paper, were hawked about by ragamuffin vendors, who, as often as not, recited a stanza or two of the current ‘hit’ as an enticement to the purchaser.
Thomas Street was the best pitch in the old days. With its open-air market and fair combined (especially on such occasions as Christmas Eve, when last-minute purchases could be made from street stalls or horse-drawn carts pulled up by the footpath) the raucous voices of the balladeers and verse vendors soared above the noise and bustle. There were ballads to commemorate patriotic subjects, Parnell of Avondale, Home Rule, The Howth Gun-Running; chuckle-raising ‘epics’ of canal barges and inland ‘voyages’ like The Cruise of the Calabar, The Thirteenth Lock, The Wreck of the Vartry; and even tributes to Dublin street traders like Mickey Baggs, The Twangman and Biddy Mulligan the Pride of the Coombe. Likewise the various fish, vegetable and cattle markets — all with their adjacent pubs — were places to go for the latest rhyming commentaries or ‘stop press’ ballads on which the printer’s ink was still wet.
The printer, it should be added, was not infrequently held responsible for the eccentric and mischievous outpourings of the anonymous scribe. Arigho (who, in the early years of that century printed the still popular ballad which dealt with a ‘hooley’ of ragmen in Ash Street) was for a long time after persecuted by the various ‘notabilities’ mentioned in The Ragman’s Ball. Humpy Soodelum, Billy Boland, Grace and Dunlavin all demanded ‘largesse’ for the unauthorised use of their names, exacting their own justice under the law of libel by demanding to be treated to free drink whenever they happened on poor Mr Arigho!
But many of the ballads, in addition to showing the Dubliner’s instinct for the value of words and wit, also provide a handy and easily accessible guide to the ordinary occurrences of life and a glimpse into remote traditions. The following verses (which first appeared about 1910) are almost a directory of Dublin trades at the time and of the streets wherein they were plied, and as such they tell us something of our social history:
On George’s Quay I first began
And there became a porter;
Me and my master soon fell out
Which cut my acquaintance shorter.
In Sackville street a pastry cook,
In James’s street a baker,
In Cork street I did coffins make
In Eustace street a preacher …
The lengthy saga goes on to list the streets of grocers, grinders, clothes dryers, shoe sellers, hatters, sawyers, lawyers, brokers, drovers, glovers, booksellers, carpenters, butchers, tailors, drapers, ’bacco pipe makers, gilders, coach-makers etc.; and ends with …
In High street I sold hosiery,
In Patrick street I sold all blades;
So if you wish to know my name
They call me Jack of All Trades.
But who was ‘Jack of All Trades’? And who were the other nameless rhymesters who enriched the lore and the traditions of our city? Perhaps we’ll never know. But one thing is almost certain — Dubliners will still be singing their merry street ballads a hundred years from now.
The University men frequently penned ballads and doggerel. Goldsmith composed and sold such ballads on the streets and then quietly mingled with the motley crowd to watch the effect of his rhyming words on the audience. Charles Lever was not only a keen student of ballad literature but, in his Trinity days, went about the most frequented parts of the city in a hired uniform singing his own compositions. In the true style of the regular or ‘professional’ ballad-makers he showed scant respect for the susceptibilities of ‘his betters’:
O, Dublin City, there is no doubting
Bates every city upon the say:
’Tis there you’d hear O’Connell spouting,
And see Lady Morgan making tay.
For ’tis the capital of the finest nation
With charming peasantry on a fruitful sod,
Fighting like divils for conciliation
And hating each other for the love of God.
Trinity’s Edwin Hamilton MA, whose book entitled Dublin Doggerels was published by Smith of Dame Street in 1877, and later reprinted in London, made mild fun of many Dublin institutions such as his alma mater, the GPO, Zoological Gardens, St Stephen’s Green, the Four Courts and the River Liffey:
In the West the Liffey rises,
In the East its course is done:
Thus the River L despises
The example of the sun.
The patriot and statesman Arthur Griffith is credited with the authorship of the Grand Canal ‘epic’, ‘The Thirteenth Lock’, and his contemporaries, James Joyce and Oliver St John Gogarty, also, from time to time, indulged in the lampooning verse. Indeed, Joyce’s final and curious novel takes its title from a popular Dublin ballad of more than a century ago:
Whack fol the da, dance to your partner,
Welt the flure, your trotters shake,
Wasn’t it the truth I told you,
Lots of fun at Finnegan’s Wake.
And his fictional character ‘plump Buck Mulligan’ — in real life the poet, wit, surgeon Dr Oliver St John Gogarty — penned the following lines:
I will live in Ringsend,
With a red-headed whore,
And the fan-light gone in
Where it lights the halldoor;
And listen each night
For her querulous shout,
As at last she streels in
And the pubs empty out.
Perhaps the most prolific of the Dublin ballad-makers was Michael Moran of Faddle Alley in the Liberties. Born in the 1790s, and blind almost from birth, he was sent out by his penurious parents to beg — and then later to rhyme and recite — at the street corners and the bridges over the Liffey. Moran had a prodigious memory and a vast repertoire of romantic, religious, rowdy and rollicking chants which he could call upon at will. From the best known of his religious recitations, ‘St Mary of Egypt’ — which tells of an Egyptian harlot who is converted to righteousness by Bishop Zozimus — Moran earned the nickname by which he was after remembered, ‘Zozimus’. To him are attributed many of the nineteenth-century street ballads, including the still popular ‘In Agypt’s Land’, wherein — and with the nasally twang of the true Liffeysider — he parodies the intolerable solemnity of the religious verse of the previous century.
When Zozimus died in April 1846, all the city’s ballad singers with fiddles and the like came to his wake in the narrow, dingy room which he occupied at 15 Patrick Street.
All of them — the well-known and the nameless rhymesters — are still very much part of the Dublin lore and the traditions which they recorded in their ballads. Their eccentric and colourful outpourings are not merely a haphazard collection of quaint and idle verses for mere entertainment — they are part of the everyday life of the city, part of the accumulated thought which can give a deeper insight into the soul of the citizens. They provide a handy, easily accessible and commonsense guide into the ordinary occurrences of life and a glimpse into remote traditions and happenings. They depict the interests, the humour and the political satires of our ancestors. At their worst they show our vulgar prejudices, and at their best they shed a penetrating light onto the nature of the Irish mind and show the national instinct for the value of words.
It is surely part of the charm, the hallowed antiquity and the usefulness of the ballad that it belongs to no one in particular and yet belongs to all of us. And it is thus that it has been handed down to us, a faded and dog-eared broadsheet, a heritage learnt by the fire-side or in the street, a verse or two overheard in the markets or in the pubs — each expressing something of the thoughts and feelings of our people over the centuries. And what of the long-forgotten ballad-makers? Perhaps their greatest epitaph is that written by another anonymous Dublin scribe: “… They wielded their pens, come weal or woe … courage they praised, cowardice they distained and foolishness they ridiculed.”
Vulgar Verse And Variations
Rowdy Rhymes And Rec-im-itations,
Bawdy Ballads And Ancient Airs
Overheard At Country Fairs;
Doleful Dirges, Short Or Long,
Dirty Doggerel, Sacred Song,
‘Hay Foot, Straw Foot’, ‘Ease-Of-Heart’
Garnered, Gleaned At City Mart;
Rhyming Couplet, Queer Quatrain
‘Ranty-Poly’, Rough Refrain
‘Lilli-Bullero’, ‘Rub-A-Dub-Dub’
Croaking Chorus From The Pub;
‘Diddly-Di-Do’, ‘Riddle-Me-Riddle’
Garramucka, Whistle And Fiddle,
Sailor Shanty, Salt Or Sweet
Skipping Games From Dublin Street:
Mad-Ri-Gal And Merry Tune
Lilt And Lyric, Chaunt and Croon
Odious Odes And Paltry ‘Pomes’
From The Factories, From The Homes;
Lullaby, Or Low Lament
Ribald Anthem, Rude Comment
‘Up She Rises’, And ‘Yo-Ho-Ho’
… These Are The Only Songs I Know!
All the culshies agree that the Rose of Tralee
Was a maiden of fame and renown;
Like Rosie O’Grady, that sweet Irish lady,
And the Star of the old County Down;
Plus the Queen of the Boyne, and the Rose of Mooncoin,
And the Lass with the Delicate Air;
There’s the Pride of Gleneen, and my Dark Rosaleen,
Each colleen so pure and so fair,
But from east to the west, surely the best
From Bantry to Carrickmacross
Was that charmer of hearts — the queen of the tarts!
The ould hoor from Hack-a-ball’s Cross.
Oh a darlin’, a daisy; so fat and so lazy,
With arms like the trunks of a tree
And how she’d confound you, when she got them round you
And planked you right down on her knee;
And you knew you were kissed (when she was half-pissed)
Red lips like big lumps of raw meat
And the scent of her breath — I remember it yet!
Stale porter and putrefyin’ teeth.
But we never lost hope that she’d learn to use soap
Or even that new dental floss
Though her clothes were in rags — ah the toast of the hags!
The ould hoor from Hack-a-ball’s Cross.
Like a wind-blown rose was the drip from her nose,
A dew drop so fragile and thin,
If it just missed her mouth it still journeyed south
And moistened the warts on her chin.
And no tune was so sweet as the hum from her feet
— That song is still deep in my heart! —
There was no one immune to the way she kept tune
With a burp, then a belch and a fart!
You may sing about Tess, Molly, Nancy and Bess
You may praise little Polly or Floss
But none had a wallop like the County Louth trollop
… The ould hoor from Hack-a-ball’s Cross.
(with apologies to Edwin Hamilton, MA, and his Dublin Doggerels of 1877)
“Forgive and forget,” you say with a smile,
And I freely agree with your plea;
Though I cannot recall who had forgot
Or if the fault lies with you or with me.
You forget that I’m ever forgiving
(I forgive your forgetting that fact)
But remember, I’m given to lapses
And my memory was never intact.
And if I forgot to forgive you
You gave me as good as you got
You remembered all I’d forgotten
And my forgiveness you quickly forgot.
And remember the little forget-me-not
That once I gave to thee?
You didn’t forget to fling that back
Though you forgot what that did to me.
You begged its return; “Forgive me,” you cried.
I forgave you — or have you forgot? —
But I couldn’t recall just what I had done
With your little forget-me-not.
“Forget it!” you said, through a fresh flood of tears,
(Did that mean forgiveness or not?)
I confess that I cannot remember at all
If you forgave all the things I forgot.
But I forgave you, I remember it well,
Though I could not so quickly forget
That you still recall the things I forgot
While forgetting my forgiveness as yet.
I forgave, I forgive, I’ve forgotten
(Forgive me, I’ve never kept score!)
Of the times you forgot my forgiving …
I forgive your forgetting once more.
So “Forgive and forget” you say with a smile —
I’ll forgive for as long as I’ll live!
But dearest I have to be honest with you
… I forget what I have to forgive!
He that has trod our city’s streets
And has heard the tales of old …
Who but he has heard so much
That has so well been told?
And did he listen with willing ear
To ballad and rhyme and song
Then he heard an old town’s tale
In the music of the throng.
He that has heard the wild catcalls
And harked to the old nick-name …
Who but he has heard so much
of our follies and our fame?
And did he hear, down through the years,
The doggerels that deride
Then he heard an old town’s taunting
At pomposity and pride.
He that has walked the Georgian square
And the old Victorian places …
Who but he has seen so much
Of a city’s airs and graces?
And did he view with knowing eye
Such elegance and charm
Then he’s walked with Swift and Joyce …
And he’s walked it arm-in-arm.