What Americans Know and How They Know It: Song

Abstract

“The Irish don’t really think about writing. It is just a natural extension of what we do all the time, which is talking.” So says best-selling novelist Maeve Binchy.1 A piece of evidence that Binchy is right about the importance of oral narrative to the Irish is the fact that in Irish schools, as part of their education in Irish language and culture, secondary-school students preparing for their “leaving certs,” comprehensive exit exams, read a work whose English title is An Old Woman’s Reflections. These are oral narratives collected from a storyteller named Peig Sayers (1873–1958), who lived on Great Blasket Island, off the Dingle Peninsula in southwestern Ireland. Sayers is presented to modern Irish students as an authentic representative of an ancient heritage, her tales as a true reflection of life as it was lived in a traditional culture now close to extinction. In his introduction to his English translation of Sayers’s tales, Seamus Ennis describes such storytellers as Sayers as “caretakers of a peasant tradition, the carriers of an oral culture, that once covered the Atlantic fringe of Europe. They belong to antiquity, to a Europe that had no books, no radio, no cinema or television, a Europe whose only entertainment was the parish lore or the winter-night’s tale told by a passing traveller.”2