What would Nelly Kane say?

There is a precipitous road that runs from the heart of Dùn Chaoin, over the hills and into Dingle. It’s a tempting short cut, one that has claimed a life or two. I trace it with my finger from the windows of our sitting room. The only decent connection between Dùn Chaoin and Dingle, running up the hill and vanishing into the occasional outcropping of rock, as mysterious and elusive as my broadband signal, that is sometimes as swift as wireless, others, slow enough to make me want to throw a bottle into the sea off the western edge of the Great Blasket to my relations at home.

The other night I went to a friend’s house for dinner, he grew up with an even mix of English and Irish in the house, and so our conversation switched between the two, haphazard, lazy as a drunk shuffling down Green Street on a Saturday night. We ended up in a philosophical argument about whether or not it’s best to write strictly what you know, or allow the imagination free reign. When I write many things, songs, or the occasional unfortunate poem, they are seldom about myself, but I like to hope, with the right amount of research and a proper dose of imagination, they can come across as authentic.

The argument ended with me hooking up my I-pod to attempt to prove to him that some of the best songs had been written by people that had no familiarity with the set of circumstances, but instead, the insight and empathy to understand, perhaps what that set of circumstances could be like. Gillian Welch’s ‘Caleb Meyer’ filled the white-washed rooms of the cottage, and suddenly there was more than just a turf fire, our words in the smoke, and the peaks of the ‘three sisters’ framed against the sky, but raspy antique parlor guitars, wooden porches, and a broken bottle of moonshine on a bed of orange pine needles.

Gillian Welch did something brilliant with her own twist on a murder ballad in ‘Caleb Myer’. We all know that folklore serves a function, the fairies stole women and children, because honestly, their kind is better of at home, and the banshee screamed to alert of us death yes, but also, to relieve a bit of the anxiety that comes with that transition, the letting go of a life, candle-lit vigils extinguished, rosary beads returned to their drawers. Folklore is folklore on both sides of the Atlantic, and murder ballads in the Appalachian south fulfilled a similar societal need.

Apparently, the Carolinas and Kentucky were chock full of dangerous men and equally foolish women. And of course, many of these foolish women met the same fate, drowned in shallow streams, pushed from steep cliffs, and in one surprising twist of affairs, pushed into the rapids by a jealous sister, only finished off for good by the local mill-owner, lusting for her gold ring. Of course, there really were dangerous men out there, and perhaps Maybell would re-consider that riverside walk with said Tom Dooley after hearing one of said thousand grisly tales.

But honestly, I love what Gillian Welch did with the old story. Nelly Kane is attacked by Caleb Myer, but instead of the typical ending, she finishes him off herself with the broken neck of a moonshine bottle. Gillian Welch grew up in California, I doubt she was ever the victim of an attempted rape and murder in the mountains of Appalachia, but she certainly knows how to put an interesting, and new twist, on an old tale. And it wasn’t just the stonewalls of the room, the fire, and the sound of the sea, a primordial force wiping out the sound of the occasional passing car, but something else, that made me think I was listening to something that had been written a hundred years ago. It was the work of an imagination, coupled with the proper research, and a genuine love for a kind of music, that if not hers by birth, certainly is now by reputation and right. Mrs. Welch simply did her homework, and because of it, wrote something that comes off, to my ears as entirely authentic.

But there is one story in the Appalachians that seems to have no ending: what happened to the language of its settlers? Many families left the Western shores of Scotland during the clearances, and aside from settling in Cape Breton, they also came to the mountains of the American South, if I strain my ear hard enough to an old-time fiddle tune, can I hear, as they say in Cape Breton still, ‘The Gàidhlig in the fiddle?” Who knows, perhaps that is a tale, for another time.