Nothing changes

My daughter sent me a link to a Plain Dealer piece; a grandmother whose still illiterate grandchildren could bellow the lyrics of any Irish song from the back seat. She tried to steer them off the whiskey, onto ships and love songs, threading her way through the minefield of the implications of “bottom of the sea.” To quote Sheridan, the land of happy wars and sad love longs. Or Freud, with whom this grandma ended her piece, one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.

“Sound familiar, Ma?” my daughter asked. I wrote it up a couple of years ago; here it is again.

I unpacked my folk albums when I divorced, and the girls and I did a lot of Saturday morning housework to the beat of an Irish group downstairs on the stereo.  Along came the magic of 8 track tapes and recording equipment, and I was in business; all my albums could be played in the car.  The drive to work was a lot shorter.

My girls liked the music, too, apparently. At least they didn't complain.  There often was a third girl in the car, too, Chrissy, who lived next door and was Beth’s good friend. Here’s an old 110 film snap.  You can see Beth’s black Irish hair, Shelly’s Teutonic blond hair, and almost make out that Chrissy and her brother Mark have beautiful red hair.  I turned heads when I walked through a store with those three girls!   I could hear minds turning and opinions forming.

The girls each were a year apart and their average age was about eight when Chrissy’s mother dropped by one day to tell me I was enabling the girls to form good opinions of reprehensible behavior.  The three of them were enamored of the Clancy Brothers version of William Bloat and could be found and heard singing it in both back yards and out on the street.  “It glorifies murder and suicide,” Mary said.

I told her I’d heard worse versions that included clotted blood and thought it could even be considered an early advertising jingle.  Or, heavy handed chauvinism.  In any event, the girls didn't unlearn the song and Chrissy was still allowed to come over.

In a mean abode

On the Shankell road

Lived a man named William Bloat

And he had a wife

The bane of his life

Who always got his goat

And one day at dawn

With her night dress on

He slit her bloody throat

Now he was glad

He had done what he had

As she lay there stiff and still

Till suddenly all of the angry law

Filled his soul with an awful chill

And to finish the fun

So well begun

He decided himself to kill

Then he took the sheet

From his wife’s cold feet

And he twisted it into a rope

He hanged himself

From the pantry shelf

Was an easy end let’s hope

With his dying breath

And he facing death

He solemnly cursed the pope

But the strangest turn

Of this whole concern

Was only just beginning

He went to hell

But his wife got well

And she’s still alive and sinning

For the razor blade

Was German made

But the rope was Belfast linen