'Danny Boy': True Emerald Isle classic or just the 'Freebird' of Irish music?

Many top recording artists have covered "Danny Boy."
Many top recording artists have covered "Danny Boy."

"Danny Boy" is played at many policeman and firefighter memorial services, so we all knew it was coming.

The attendees included black and Latino residents who adored the big, sweet, Irish-American cop who patrolled their neighborhoods. He left his job as a New York policeman because he said he couldn't bear the thought of killing someone. So when he accidentally walked in on a store robbery one evening after his shift as security at a local hospital, he was unarmed when he tackled the gunman who fatally wounded him. His death embodied the cruel irony of the words "Irish luck."

They played lots of music at the funeral. I don't remember any of it. But I remember that, when a man I didn't know began singing "Danny Boy," everyone in the church cried, including the men. Afterwards, a Spanish-speaking bodega owner asked me what the words were because this was such a powerful "goodbye song."

He's right. And that cross-cultural emotional power makes "Danny Boy" an intriguing musical mystery. The lyrics could be sung to Danny by a parent, a sweetheart or a mentor. The words never state where Danny is going -- to war (the song as we know it became popular right before World War I), to America to escape the Ireland's great famine, poverty, the cops, the Brits, or maybe he was just leaving home to find his fortunes as a young man.

There is no hint or hope that the singer will follow Danny on his journey. Maybe the singer had to stay behind because the familysold everything to buy Danny's ticket to America. Danny would have the burden of carrying his family's expectations and fulfilling his their dreams of his having a better life. Essayist Richard Rodriguez once said "Danny Boy" made him think of a Mexican mother bidding her son goodbye before he made the long, terrifying trek across the desert and into America.

"Danny Boy" was published with its current lyrics in 1913, an era when Irish immigrants were still despised in America and dangerous jobs -- firefighter, police officer, miner. laborer, boxer -- were all that was available to them. It's an experience that many immigrants understand.

Growing up in East St. Louis, I heard "Danny Boy" played before boxing matches instead of the national anthem in the Super Star Gym, a battered, scruffy bunker that made stardom in that perilous sport seem even more impossible. And when the tune floated through the sound system, the boxers' fathers would brush tears away.

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photo Many top recording artists have covered "Danny Boy."

Famous folks who sang 'Danny Boy'

* Elvis Presley * Johnny Cash * Eric Clapton * Roy Orbison * Mahalia Jackson * Sinead O'Connor * The Three Tenors * The Muppets (Animal, Beaker and the Swedish Chef) * The Pogues * Bing Crosby * Harry Connick, Jr.

Most of these boxers and their dads were not Irish.On one particular day, I tried to console one of the dads by reassuring him that there was a doctor in the audience to take care of any injuries. He said his tears weren't caused by fear.

"The song just reminds me that I hoped for more for my son when I came here from the Sudan and still I hope," he said.

Musicians skilled in Irish music are constantly asked to perform the song at their gigs so, for them, it can feel infuriatingly overplayed. Hey, I threatened to shoot my own car radio if I ever heard it play "All About the Bass" again. But most of us hear "Danny Boy" perhaps twice per year, if at all. The impact remains fresh for us.

And even for some who've played it to death, the song still has its charms.

"I always liked the melody even though it is overdone," says Rick Hall, a hammered dulcimer player with Knoxville-based Irish band Four Leaf Peat. "When I first heard it played well on uilleann pipes, it renewed my respect for the melody. And when a $100 bill went into the tip jar, we managed a rendition."

James Sullivan, a correspondent for the Boston Globe newspaper, wrote that he is "partial to the suitably homely version by the Pogues' Shane MacGowan, the perpetually soused punk singer who makes traditional Irish tunes sound as though the sentimentality has been especially hard-earned."

Irish musicians Enda Scahill and vocalist Megan Ariel Clark, and Robbie Hilliard, a Chattanoogan transplanted to Atlanta, agree the melody is beautiful despite how often it is played.

The melody has been traced back to a 17th-century tune composed by the blind Irish harpist Ruari Dall O'Cathain. The legend is, he heard fairies singing it in a forest.

The lyrics have a much more earthbound origin, written by British barrister Frederic Weatherly at a time when Irish fighters and British soldiers lay dead in the streets of Ulster. Yet those lyrics -- which contain few descriptive details beyond rose-laden glens with winter snows -- when they are wedded with the magically haunting melody, are what makes the song so universal.

And even the most devout Irish rebel might find it hard to to dislike the modest, kind-hearted Weatherly. He wrote in his autobiography that he was thrilled that "Danny Boy" was a unifying ballad "sung by Sinn Feiners and Ulstermen, Catholics and Protestants alike."

Katie Overy at the University of Edinburgh's Reid College of Music has written several papers on the psychology of music and argues that the melody of "Danny Boy" resonates emotionally with everyone, regardless of cultural background or geographic location, because human brains are wired to respond to that peculiar rainbow-like melodic arc in each verse.

In the song, the music starts to build toward a climax then gently falls, increasing tension, she notes, and the words mesh with that rise and falling emotion. When the music suddenly soars to a climax, the outburst of feeling occurs when the singer imagines, not a homecoming party, but the singer's death and Danny's graveside visit.

Those lyrics may be faux Irish but it's a good bet any Cuban, Mexican, Hungarian, Scottish, Jewish, Russian, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Somalian or Syrian refugee who escaped a terrifying homeland can imagine that the only family reunion he will ever have is a graveside communion with ghosts.

Here's the biggest mystery of all: The ending verse offers no reassuring image of heaven, just Danny praying over the singer's grave. Yet the feeling is comforting and sweet.

Emory University humanities professor James Flannery, a gifted Irish tenor, solves that mystery in his essay about "Danny Boy." He writes he refused to learn "Danny Boy" as a singer until a Jewish friend suffering a long illness asked him to sing it at her funeral; it was her favorite song. He fell under its spell in the final verse with its "airy sound of angels."

"The melody tumbles downward after the high, suspended note, allowing the singer to complete the tender thought of Danny whispering his love to the deceased but this time the rising and falling of the melody," Flannery writes. But this time (the rising and falling melody) "feels more like a caress a recurring pattern of mystical redemption."

Peter Pardee, who organizes the annual Rocky Mountain Irish Festival in Colorado, predicts "Danny Boy" will be with us 100 years from now "because it's a magnificent melody despite being done shabbily. It's not likely to vanish into oblivion."

It's actually easy to imagine the first humans selected for a Mars colony boarding their rockets as "Danny Boy" plays. Each volunteer was required to sign a statement saying he or she understands that, chances are, they will never see their loved ones again. Decades later, when the first Martian colonist dies, his friends may need a song to comfort them, an immigrants' song as sweetly beautiful as the blue planet Earth and as cosmically lonely as being an outer space immigrant in a wilderness of stars.

Contact Lynda Edwards at ledwards@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6391.

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