Video of The Dubliners performing Fields of Athenry
Brian O'Driscoll
It’s strange how songs can suddenly develop a life of their own and go off in directions never expected by the people who wrote them.
The Fields of Athenry is a good example. When I first heard it back in the 1970s I thought it was a traditional song and couldn’t understand how it escaped my attention all those years that I’d been following Irish traditional music.
The story behind the writing of a song can often be as interesting as the song itself.
Raglan Road is a good example. It was written, of course, by Patrick Kavanagh, and given the lofty themes and the subtlety of the emotions it conveys, it would be natural to assume that it was born out of some lofty literary ideal.
The truth, however, is more mundane and is based upon cabbages and turnips, as revealed by the object of Kavanagh’s love when he wrote Raglan Road.
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