Back Home In Derry—Christy Moore
#365Songs: July 11
As you may or may not recall, #365Songs is in the midst of another theme week, and the theme is “songs about hometowns.”
We kicked off the week yesterday with “My City Was Gone” by The Pretenders.
Today, in honor of Smitty being in Ireland, it’s Christy Moore’s performance of the brilliantly yearning lyric “Back Home In Derry.”
In my previous post, I wrote at length about why I generally hate songs about hometowns. I neglected to mention hyperbolized longing as one of the many reasons for my distaste.
I don’t want to hear about you being away at college and pining away for your old friends.
I don’t want to hear about your new job in another city.
I don’t want to hear about “the girl you left behind.”
If you’re going to long for something, there better be a damn good reason.
Dying of starvation in a prison cell, hallucinating to yourself the story of exiled rebels in a far-away land, is a pretty damn good reason.
Bobby Sands was a member of the IRA during the period in Ireland known as “The Troubles.” As a Catholic child, he’d been bullied and ostracized by the Protestant majority in the north. Even in Rathcoole, a place where he’d called Protestants friends … before they turned on him. After leaving school, the harassment continued on the job. He was eventually run out of employment at gunpoint. At the other end of those guns were Ulster loyalist Protestants.
Sands died in prison in 1981 at the age of 27. He was 66 days into a prison hunger strike.
Three years later, Christy Moore recorded “Back Home in Derry” for his Ride On album. It would go on to be one of his most revered pieces. It was written by Sands while he was in prison.
I first heard the song being played by a singer-guitarist whose name I never knew, upstairs at the Oliver St. John Gogarty pub in Dublin. It would have been in 1999 or so. It was one of the most moving live music performances I’d ever experienced, and I’ve never forgotten it since.
My missus and I would go on to live in Ireland for quite some time, albeit in the wild west of The Burren—an altogether different Ireland from the pubs of Temple Bar.
In the end, “Back Home In Derry” can’t properly be called a song about a hometown, for it’s a song of departure, not returning. The lyrics are anguished as they describe a journey that takes men far from their homes and ever closer to hell:
At the mouth of the Foyle, bid farewell to the soil
As down below decks we were lying
O’Doherty screamed, woken out of a dream
By a vision of bold Robert dying
The sun burned cruel as we dished out the gruel
Dan O’Connor was down with a fever
Sixty rebels today bound for Botany Bay
How many will meet their receiver?
I cursed them to hell as her bow fought the swell
Our ship danced like a moth in the firelight
White horses rode high as the devil passed by
Taking souls to Hades by twilight
Five weeks out to sea, we were now forty-three
Our comrades we buried each morning
In our own slime we were lost in a time
Of endless night without dawning
There is no peace in the song, no resolution. In the end, there is only a man whose body still walks a foreign land.
Van Diemen’s land is a hell for a man
To live out his whole life in slavery
Where the climate is raw and the gun makes the law
Neither wind nor rain care for bravery
Twenty years have gone by, I’ve ended my bond
My comrades ghosts walk behind me
A rebel I came — I’m still the same
On the cold winters night you will find me …
Oh, I wish I was back home in Derry.
~
Start following the #365Songs playlist today, and listen to each new song with each new article!
