Off to Philadelphia

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 318, 27 July 1945, Page 8

Off to Philadelphia

| RISH songs commonly broadcast can be divided into two classes .- the genuine and the synthetic; supposing that "The Mountains of Mourne" stands in about the same relation to "Molly Brannigan" as "Swanee, River" to "Can’t Stay Away, Lord." But the fact is that a great part of Irish folk song is literature of exile. The exodus of the tribal nobility in the seventeenth century, the mass emigrations of the starving poor through the nineteenth, gave rise to an immense number of songs of the "Off to Philadelphia" variety, which have just as good a claim to authenticity as the home-grown classics. However, no doubt this can be pressed too far. When the emotion of nostalgia was exploited by politicians and professional songwriters, it was also commercialised into such startingly false outpourings aswell, never mind which. But one readily remembers the rather acid American song whith ran:»"There came to the beach 4 poor exile of Erin; the dew on his wet robe hung heavy and chill. Ere the steamer that brought him had passed out of hearing He was Alderman Mike introducing a Bill"; or the Thorne Smith hero who met a leprechaun, who ex- plained that his ancestors had left Ireland many centuries before "to escape the uninterrupted wailing of the songs," and had lived happily in the State of New York until the police force was recruited from the County Cork, when most of them had faded away in despair.