Bring Your Own Hammer is a new project in which historians and composers collaborate to create new and original song cycles based on historical sources.
It is rooted in the history of nineteenth-century Ireland and of the Irish Diaspora and involves leading composers, musicians and singers including Agu, Linda Buckley, Adrian Crowley, Cathal Coughlan, Eileen Gogan, Tony Higgins, Carol Keogh, Wally Nkikita, Brigid Mae Power, Michelle O’Rourke, Mike Smalle, Jah Wobble and James Yorkston. The composers work with professional historians to create new work and the collaboration aims to explore the boundaries of historical and artistic interpretation by reflecting upon and reimagining primary sources and the people who left them behind.
The first two releases in the series are from acclaimed Irish singer-songwriter Adrian Crowley, ably assisted on “Golden Streets, Bitter Tears” by Brigid Mae Power (watch the video below). It’s also our Song of the Day.
Adrian is a prolific songwriter, singer, composer and performer, originally from Galway and now based in Dublin. He is also involved in film, as evidenced by his debut role as a screenwriter working with Irish director Niall McCann on the latter’s new feature film, entitled The Science of Ghosts. Brigid is an Irish singer, songwriter and musician. She has produced three solo albums since 2016. All have been highly critically acclaimed with 2020’s Head Above The Water regarded as one of the finest Irish albums of recent years.
Project co-director Dr. Richard McMahon of Mary Immaculate College, Limerick notes…“The songs aim to contribute to public history and a re-invigoration of traditional forms of presenting the past, connecting the audience with important historical themes in ways perhaps not possible in conventional ‘written’ histories. It is our hope that Bring Your Own Hammer will be of benefit to the historian, the composer and the wider public. We are delighted to partner with Dimple Discs, who have been at the forefront of releasing and promoting some of the most important and ground breaking contemporary Irish music of the last decade.”
Notes on Golden Streets, Bitter Tears – This song is a beautiful and poignant evocation of the idea of the sea journey as a means of escape from the poverty and inequalities of nineteenth-century Ireland and of the promise and perils of migration in a more universal sense. The narrator has not only migrated overseas but is encouraging others to do the same and leave behind the ‘devil hunger pains’ that characterised his life in the home country. America is ostensibly portrayed as a land of equality and freedom where he can ‘walk with the best of the town’, and he is freed from ‘misery chains’, with an implicit juxtaposition of the liberty and opportunity in America and the repression and restrictions of life in Ireland. The attractive and enticing image of life ‘over the waves’ is, however, superbly undercut by the song’s refrain ‘Golden Streets, Bitter Tears’, suggesting all is not as it seems. This refrain offers a subtle but compelling hint at what we hope will be a key theme of this project; the promise and peril of the migrant sea journey of the nineteenth century and the often bitter consequences for many who sought to leave or, indeed, return. The song is inspired by migrant letters sent back to Ireland which offered an idealised image of life in the United States and the lyrics draw in part from the original letters and in part from the careful imaginings of the composer.
You can also hear Adrian singing ‘The Cunnard Line’ which is also available via Bandcamp.
Order via Bandcamp: https://bringyouownhammerpresents.bandcamp.com/
Find out more here: https://byohammer.com/