Revisiting Ireland's Protest Folk and Rebel Songs--Part 1

Centuries before some commercially-motivated professional songwriters, professional entertainers and global media conglomerate record companies began to make a lot of money in the late 1950's and 1960's from selling vinyl records of commercial pop protest songs to a mass audience of consumers, non-commercially-motivated and nationally oppressed people in Ireland were writing--either individually or collectively--topical protest folk songs and Irish rebel songs. As Patrick Galvin noted in his 1950's book, Irish Songs of Resistance (1169-1923):

"...The vast bulk of Irish songs...are either anonymous reports of actual events, or else epic appeals to nationhood and love of liberty, composed by men of letters and other public figures, and universally known and sung all over the country...

"The Irish people have kept these songs alive because they represented and expressed the people's own powerful and legitimate emotions and desires. At the same time, the songs helped to direct and canalize action in support of those desires...

"Since the history of Ireland is largely that of some 800 years of resistance to invasion, annexation, absorption, settlement, enclosure, oppression and exploitation by England, Ireland's songs sound a continual note of resistance...

"...The great bulk of the national ballads (in the English language) date from the 19th-century, and above all from the mid-19th-century...

"Almost all Irish national songs since the 1840's...are composed poems...containing many allusions to past battles, rebellions, heroes and traitors, intended for singing to traditional airs or popular melodies...

(end of part 1)