In Wayfaring Strangers there is narrative of the social and political history of emigration across the years from Scotland to Ulster in Ireland to North America and along the great wagon roads of early days of travel in North America. Such reflections, interview segments, and thoughts are a strength of the book.
Those are ideas of Irish singer, songwriter, and flute and whistle player Nuala Kennedy, who has herself lived in the United States and Scotland as well as her native Ireland. Having arrived wherever you are, people who maybe couldn’t remember all the words, they would appreciate being able to share them and to hear those songs again…” The process of singing and the process of remembering the words, it’s a very powerful personal one. If things are tough, you can think on the stories they can tell you.
They are almost your friends that will mind you on your journey. If you have the gift of these songs with you and you have the memory of them in your mind, it’s like company for you in your life. “I imagine and try to put myself in the place of people who were leaving home all those years ago and traveling to America, and leaving under painful circumstances very often.
All the more so in days before recorded music, in times when travel often meant parting from friends and family, never to see each other again. Think about it: when you hear a familiar melody or a song you know from home in a foreign land, it calls forth emotion and memory beyond the words and sound of the song itself - all the more so if you are living in or moving to new land. Music is a powerful source of identity and connection for any who travel, wayfaring stranger or not. It is a song which has roots in both melody and idea that reach back to Scotland and Ireland as well.įiona Ritchie and Douglas Orr have chosen Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia for the name of a book in which they tell the long story, the carrying stream of emigration, travel, and continuing and changing ideas of heritage shaped at first in Scotland, then carried with Scots who settled in the north of Ireland, and carried across the ocean to the American states, finding a place to flourish and grow anew in the mountains of Appalachia. Wayfaring Strangers: the song, a tale of both physical and spiritual travel, came from the southern mountains of North America to become known and shared across the world.
0 kommentar(er)
