The Town I Loved So Well

As you may or may not know, I have a deep fondness for Irish folk music, especially the long and mournful narrative ballads. No one performs bitter-sweet nostalgia like the Irish, and why not, they have got plenty to cry about. The ability to drink, dance, laugh and cry through any set of troubles is a collective cultural life skill that the Irish hold dear, and that I feel an affinity for. Written during the lowest years of The Troubles in the 1970’s, The Dubliners’ ode to the city of Derry is a protest song that paints the abstraction of the political over with the emotional clarity of the personal. An formerly-sleepy industrial city that became a major military strategic point during the Troubles, Derry is described fondly but unromantically as a bleak place of poverty and thankless factory work, where people’s lives unspool ‘by the gasyard walls’. But even people living rough lives in crappy, overlooked places deserve to do so in peace, free from bloodshed and fear. Therein the effectiveness of the song, a lament for any peoples whose world has been upended by political conflicts beyond their control.