It took singing to do it, she discovered. She could have gone all over Ireland, telling everyone she met that she was hunting for songs, and everyone would have nodded knowingly and sighed sadly and explained that they were no great singers in that particular part of the country but that if she would only go north or south or west or east, if she would in short only go elsewhere to some more romantic part of the nation, then she might find what she was looking for.
Yet the moment her fingers plucked at the strings of her guitar they managed to strike a responsive chord in the men and women within hearing range. Once she had raised her own voice in song, everyone was anxious to sing, and to listen to her own singing, and then it suddenly turned out that the town was a treasure trove of words and melody.
And was it songs she was after? Why, Wexford was the very home of songs, she was speedily assured. Songs of all sorts, songs in English and songs in Irish, too. Sure, the Clancys came from Carrick in Tipperary, but weren’t there singers as good throughout County Wexford? And didn’t they have songs right here that the rest of Ireland had never heard, much less the rest of the world? And could she stay another night? Because there would be a hooley at Paddy Molloy’s house, they’d plan it here and now, with drink enough for everyone and the best voices for five miles around sure to be there. Could she bring her tape recorder? Sure, and why not? Now if she wanted songs, why sure and they’d teach her songs!
From that night on the whole course of her trip was completely changed. Even before the next night’s hooley she began to gather material. She spent the morning and afternoon at a table in a café around the corner from her rooming house, and men and women were forever coming to her table to ask her if she knew this song or that one, and singing to her the ones she did not know. She had her tape recorder with her and faithfully committed each new song to tape. Many of them, she knew, would prove worthless. Some were little more than different words to familiar tunes. Others were collections of clumsy lyrics, faithful as records of this battle or that but musically unexciting. But in spite of the large quantity of unusable material, she did succeed in gathering many songs that would be valuable to her.
And later on at the party, there were more songs and several singers who were good enough to deserve a place on the album of native singers she hoped to get Folklore to issue. A small band formed itself at the party — two banjos, a tin whistle, a drum, a guitar. She kept her tape recorder running constantly, and when she played the tapes back the next morning she was delighted to discover that she had better than twenty minutes’ worth of material that could be transcribed directly, material that could stand as the core of an eminently valuable album of Irish music.
She left the town reluctantly the next day, sad to see the last of it but at the same time anxious to get on with her work. She had found the formula now and was confident that it would serve her ideally wherever she went. Singing was contagious in Ireland. If she went among the people with her guitar and her songs, it would not be long before she had more new material than she could ever use.
The system worked even better than she had expected. She headed steadily westward, never going very far in a single day, purposefully seeking out the smallest, quietest towns along her route. She went to towns with names that seemed themselves to be made of music, towns like Mullennakill and Ballyduff and Furraleigh and Poulnamucky and Ballylooby. She spent long, lazy afternoons walking through the green hillside down narrow winding roads bordered by fences of piled stone.
She wondered aloud once where all the stones came from, and a farmer told her with a laugh, “We come on the stones when plowing, and the only way to be rid of them is to build fences with them. If they’re part of a fence they can’t be in the ground, and it’s hard growing praties in stone.” No mortar held the stones in place. They were piled neatly one upon another, and often she came upon breaks in the fences where sheep or goats had knocked some of the stones free.
The animals seemed to wander freely, in the road as often as not. She came upon every sort of animal in the narrow roadways, sheep bleating mournfully, fat Irish cattle grazing at the roadside, plump pigs rooting in the fields, goats knocking about in pairs, their forelegs lashed together. “The sheep will usually stay where they belong,” a man had told her, “but there’s no holding the goats, they’ve always a mind to be wandering where they shouldn’t be. But there’s no beast less apt to cooperate than a goat, and so we tie two of them together, and then they’re less quick to get over a fence. Because when one wants to go wandering the other wants to stay behind, and when that one changes his mind so does the other, and they can never quite get together, and so they stay where they’re meant to stay.”
Further west, in the inland plains of Tipperary, the soil was less rocky. There were fewer of the stone fences, and instead the roads were edged with massive banks of earth, the grass growing on the earthen dykes as well as it grew everywhere else in Ireland. Walking between those banks — they called them ditches there, a source of confusion at first because she had always thought of a ditch as a hole in the ground rather than a mound rising above ground level — walking between them, she could picture graphically the ambushes and battles of the Black-and-Tan war. She could imagine the men of the IRA flying columns crouching in the fields behind the ditches, while the Tans and Auxiliaries drove down the tortured twisted roads in their Crossley vans. Then bombs would wing down on the vans, and bold men would rest their rifle barrels on the tops of the ditches and rain fire down on the troops.
In the County Cork an old man led her outside of the town of Macroom to the very spot where a flying column had staged one of the major battles of the Troubles. He had not been there himself, he was quick to explain, but a cousin of his had been one of Tom Barry’s men and had taken a bullet in the hip that very day. And while he pointed out just where the troops had been positioned, he sang her a song commemorating the day. The last line, as it turned out, was joyously obscene — something that did not occur to the old gentleman until he had finished singing it. He blushed furiously and apologized profusely, and it was all she could do to keep from laughing aloud. She could never record that song, she thought, and could not even sing it in mixed company, but it was one she could never forget.
She ran out of tape before she reached Cork City. There she bought more and made a package of the reels she had filled, mailing them to herself in New York. In Cork the pace of her trip began to catch up with her, and she discovered that she was genuinely tired, exhausted physically by the endless walking and riding and singing, exhausted mentally and emotionally by the parade of experiences she had undertaken. She stayed longer than she planned in Cork, sleeping late in the mornings and leaving her guitar snug in its case throughout her stay. She contented herself with leisurely sightseeing and spent a night at the movies watching an American Western. She met a pair of honeymooners from Chicago and talked with them, the first Americans she had seen since she left Dublin and David Clare.