After a brief hiatus to commemorate Chris Cornell yesterday, we return to a link with boats from Wednesday’s song by The Tiger Lillies with an equally deadly, and also an epic song by Phil Chevron, guitarist with the Pogues, and taken from their acclaimed 1988 album, If I Should Fall From Grace With God. This song takes on a much broader sweep of perspectives, centring on the aspirations of Irish emigrants heading for America on ships bound for a new life.
Aside from the stirring punk take on Irish folk music, and the distinctive voice of Shane MacGowan, the storytelling of this song is highly skilled from a series of different voices, varying between first, second and third person. The first verse refers to Ellis Island and the torch of the Statue of Liberty, and the haunting ghosts of all the people who did not survive the hard journey across the ocean:
The island it is silent now
But the ghosts still haunt the waves
And the torch lights up a famished man
Who fortune could not save
Then a second-person voice addresses those who tried to make their fortune in the US:
Did you work upon the railroad
Did you rid the streets of crime
Were your dollars from the White House
Were they from the five and dime …
But following this the voice of the narrator is revealed to be a ghost, arriving on a “coffin ship” and there is nothing fictional about this. It is generally documented that 30% of travellers on these early voyages never made it to US alive.
Then in each verse, the narrative enters into that of someone in the first person who made it, describing 20th-century figures, with references to JFK and the playwrights Brendan Behan and George Cohan. Each chorus changes tone, between hope and despair and everything in between:
The first shows how many are optimistic, but not all will arrive:
Thousands are sailing
Across the Western Ocean
To a land of opportunity
That some of them will never see
Fortune prevailing
Across the Western Ocean
Their bellies full
And their spirits free
They'll break the chains of poverty
And they'll dance
And the last refers to what happens to those who arrive – lottery of the green card system, an ironic reference to the “hand of opportunity” and a shot at the church they left behind:
Thousands are sailing
Across the Western Ocean
Where the hand of opportunity
Draws tickets in a lottery
Where e'er we go, we celebrate
The land that makes us refugees
From fear of priests with empty plates
From guilt and weeping effigies
Now we dance to the music
And we dance
A remarkable history unfolding in a five-minute song, capturing lives lost and new ones made, all setting sail for a future unknown, or tragically for others, none at all.
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