I got an email last week that I've read about twelve times now. I keep coming back to it. I think it might be the most important email I've ever received. With Ana's permission, I'm sharing it here.
Dear Seamus,
My name is Ana Beatriz. I live in São Paulo, Brazil. I am 52 years old and I am writing to you because I found your website and I cried for a very long time.
My grandmother was Mary Catherine Doyle from Milltown Malbay in County Clare. She emigrated to Brazil in 1958 when she was twenty-three years old. She married my grandfather, a Brazilian man named Carlos, and they had six children. My mother was the youngest.
My grandmother never stopped being Irish. She spoke English to us at home. She cooked soda bread. She told us stories about Clare — about the cliffs and the rain and the music in the pubs. And she sang us The Rattlin' Bog.
Every Sunday after dinner, she would sing it. She taught us all the verses. We didn't understand all the words at first — we were children, and English was not our first language — but we learned the melody and the rhythm and the way the song builds and builds until you're all shouting together.
She died in 2003. She was 68. She never went back to Ireland.
When I found your website, I heard the song for the first time since her funeral. I pressed play on one of the recordings and the sound of it took me right back to her kitchen. I could smell the bread. I could hear her voice.
I am teaching it to my children now. They are 14 and 11. They sing it in English, just like she did. They don't know all the words yet but they know the chorus and they know the flea verse because that was always my grandmother's favourite part.
The song crossed an ocean with my grandmother in 1958. It lived in Brazil for forty-five years. And now, because of your website, it has come back.
Thank you, Seamus. From the bottom of my heart.
Ana Beatriz, São Paulo
I don't have anything clever to say about this. I don't have a funny aside or a self-deprecating joke.
Mary Catherine Doyle from Milltown Malbay — a town fifteen minutes from where I'm sitting right now — carried this song across the Atlantic to a country I've never been to, and it survived there for nearly half a century, passed down through generations in a kitchen in São Paulo.
That's what folk songs do. They travel. They survive. They remember, even when the people who carry them are gone.
Ana, if you're reading this: your grandmother would be fierce proud.
Slan go foill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)