There's no Wikipedia page on the subject of the "Ballad Boom". In fact, this is the closest I can get to a potted history of the phenomenon. And yet, it's frequently mentioned in Ireland. The term is used familiarly, often expecting the reader or viewer to know what it means.
The article I've linked to puts it like this: "The ‘ballad boom’, so called, refers to a period of some dozen years from the end of the 1950s to about 1970 when there was a nation-wide vogue in Ireland for the singing of (mostly) Irish songs in English by ballad groups: small vocal groups accompanying themselves with guitar, banjo and mandolin, and sometimes including a whistle player or other melody instrumentalist."
What especially intrigues me about the Ballad Boom is its timing, and its relation to the Irish cultural revival. Irish people began to value (and attempt to revive) their indigenous culture from about the late eighteenth century, although it was mostly isolated enthusiasts in those very early days. The real surge came in the late nineteenth century, with the founding of the Gaelic League (1893) and the Gaelic Athletic Association (1884), along with a plethora of other groups.
And after that...it's actually quite hard to trace the energies of Irish cultural revivalism. History books often include vague like this one: "After the heroic period of the Irish Revolution, the bread-and-butter realities of running a new state took over." But that doesn't really explain any cooling of fervour, if there was indeed a cooling of fervour. After all, there had been plenty of poverty during the Gaelic Revival and Irish Revolution, and surely only a small minority of people were actually concerned with building and administering the new state.
In any case, it's generally accepted that radio, television, and the beginning of consumer culture made Irish people more cosmopolitan and "outward-looking". So it seems strange that it was during the nineteen-sixties, the same time as the explosion of rock-and-roll and Beatlemania, that the Irish Ballad Boom took off. Was it part of the same wave, or was it some kind of counter-current? Or does that question even make sense?
Similarly, Irish language baby names grew in popularity long after the Gaelic Revival. As this article puts it: "Names such as Rían, Oisín, Tadhg, Fiadh and Éabha have featured in the top ten in recent years, with Fiadh being the most popular name for a girl in 2021. The only Irish language name to feature in the top 40 for boys in 1964 was Sean, which took the 38th spot that year."
The recent growth of Irish language schools or "gaelscoileanna" (schools where instruction is mostly through the Irish language) is another example: "In 1972, there were only 11 such schools at primary level and five at secondary level in the Republic of Ireland. As of September 2023, there were 188 gaelscoileanna at primary level, attended by over 40,000 students, and 32 gaelcholáistí and 17 aonaid Ghaeilge (Irish language units) at secondary level, attended by over 12,000 students in non-Gaeltacht areas across Ireland."
So Irish cultural revivalism is a curious and complex phenomenon. Is there a pattern underneath its apparent ebb and flow, or rather, its tendency to take different manifestations?
I think you will find that this is international - at least among smaller nations of the kind where nationalism has been a feature.
ReplyDeleteThe Ballad Boom you describe was probably part of the British Isles wide folk song revival, which led to literally hundreds of folk clubs and the possibility for hundreds of people to make a living by touring - at least, for a while.
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2025/02/soviet-and-socialist-origins-of-british.html
The language revival saw similar phenomena in other countries and regions; including increased popularity of names, in Scotland with Gallic, and in Wales with Welsh.
Other examples are the Catalan-speaking regions of Spain; and the continuing fracturing of the ex Eastern Bloc - Yugoslavia keeps on breaking up into ever smaller nations!
The EU seems to encourage this - presumably because it is easy for the bureaucrats to bribe and bully small - and new - nations.
I think it is underpinned by increased state intervention and funding; and the development of Gaelic/ Gallic/ Welsh speaking paid bureaucracies in government, the media etc. So there are middle class jobs reserved for native linguists.
There is more to it than just that - but I don't think this would have happened without state/ EU funding; nor do I think it runs at all deep in cultural terms.
I think it is little deeper or more motivating than a kind of fashion - a cultural status marker.
I believe this, because the trends have coincided with engineered and privileged mass immigration since around the millennium, and the inevitable and in consequence actual destruction of national identity. This centralized top-down cultural imposition has obliterated any real, grassroots, creative national revival.
It is happening everywhere in the West, more or less; even in Iceland! Which was, as recently as 1990, almost entirely a single extended family of Norse (and some Irish!) descent, who arrived in the middle ages. Everybody knew how they were related to everybody else. And their language was and always had been universal in the population.
Since joining the EU (94), Iceland has been increasingly flooded with immigration from all over the place - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Iceland - and their national distinctness is dissolving very fast.
Even Iceland's strong, linguistic, cultural and relationship-based nationalism seems to have been no defence at all.
I conclude that without a strong underpinning religious conviction to sustain and motivate people, nationalism is a spent force in the West.
Bruce