Songs for Social Justice With an Irish Lilt
Terry Sullivan sings for love, not money. He performed with Pete Seeger for 24 years and made a total of about $500, “because I did some plumbing for him,” Mr. Sullivan explained, referring to his day job. He still has an uncashed check for $34 from the Clearwater Revival for a performance at the festival inspired 40 years ago by Seeger’s desire to clean up the Hudson River.
Given his longtime relationship with Seeger and his circle, it is no surprise that Mr. Sullivan also sings for social justice, and he will do so twice in Sag Harbor this weekend, on Saturday at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books and on Sunday afternoon at 2 at the Eastville Community Historical Society.
Titled “Laughin’ Just to Keep From Cryin’,” the a cappella concert will feature both songs from the Irish independence fight and those from other civil rights struggles. “What I’m doing is, I’m showing the commonality across the globe. All these civil rights struggles are usually seen as disparate and separate and unrelated.” The links across cultures can be seen in “coded songs,” a selection of which will be included in both shows.
Coded songs delivered their messages in ways recognized by the oppressed but not by their oppressors. One example is “Nell Flaherty’s Drake,” which dates from 1803, the year Robert Emmet was hung by the British. Emmet was unusual in that he was a Protestant, Anglo-Irish aristocrat who started a group called United Irishmen in part because even the Irish gentry were not immune from English tyranny.
“The drake” was a coded reference to Emmet, and the song included lyrics such as “Bad luck to the robber, be he drunk or sober/that murdered Nell Flaherty’s beautiful drake.” As Mr. Sullivan explained, “You could sing this song in front of a British policeman anywhere in the empire, and he wouldn’t know what you were talking about.”
“Mbube” is another coded song, written and recorded in 1939 by Solomon Linda, a South African musician. “Mbube” means “lion” and was the nickname for Shaka Zulu, the Zulu monarch who was assassinated in 1828. “What Solomon Linda was doing is the same thing the Irish were doing with the drake,” Mr. Sullivan said. “Because the English didn’t speak Zulu, Linda was calling Shaka Zulu back from the early 1800s to the 1940s to fight apartheid.”
The original recording of “Mbube” was discovered in the early 1950s by the musicologist Alan Lomax and given to his friend Seeger, who retitled it “Wimoweh” and recorded it with the Weavers. It became a hit under the title of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” after it was rewritten for and recorded by the Tokens in 1961.
Mr. Sullivan noted that there are many coded songs in the African-American tradition. One, “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” was supposedly used in the antebellum South to pass geographic escape directions from person to person, allowing them to find their way north from Alabama. While the title refers to the hollowed-out gourd used by slaves as a water dipper, it could also be interpreted as a reference to the Big Dipper constellation, which points north.
Other Irish songs in Mr. Sullivan’s repertoire include “Óró, Sé do Bheatha ‘Bhaile,” the modern version of which was written by Patrick Pearse, one of the martyrs of the 1916 Easter Uprising. An earlier version of the song had welcomed Prince Charles to Ireland in the 18th century in the mistaken belief he would help the Irish. Pearse turned to the 16th century to conjure up as an inspiration Grace O’Malley, the “pirate queen” who was the most famous woman in Ireland in the second half of that century and so powerful she was received at court by Elizabeth I. The song, which called upon the legendary pirate to fight with and negotiate for the Irish, is still popular in Ireland today.
Mr. Sullivan’s knowledge and experience of music is as deep and reliable as his wit, and the concerts are likely to be peppered with entertaining and informative anecdotes from his years of friendship with the Seegers as well as little-known facts about the material in his set list.