Hard Rain by Alessandro Portelli

Author:Alessandro Portelli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: MUS017000, Music/Genres & Styles/Folk & Traditional, HIS016000, History/Historiography
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2022-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

Mamma mamma damme cento lire che all’America vojo anna’

Cento lire te le darei, ma all’America no no no

Il fratello dalla finestra je disse mamma lasciala annà’

Vanne via fija maledetta in mezzo al mare pozzi restà’

Quando fu alla metà der mare il bastimento je s’affonnò … 10

(Mama give me 100 lire, I want to go to America

I’d give you 100 lire, but don’t go to America

Her brother spoke from the window: Mama, let her go

OK, go, and you’ll be cursed, may you die in the middle of sea

When the boat was halfway across the sea it sank down …)11

For those who were left behind, emigration was a loss as final as death: like Dylan’s wandering son, the ballad’s wayward daughter sinks in the ocean—stricken by her mother’s curse, and because she would be lost forever anyway. To the mothers at home, emigration does not sound like a bold move in search of a better life, but like a desertion from the struggle for survival that those who stay carry on. These songs evince the pain and resentment of those who cannot foresee a future of social progress and improvement and feel the loss of all the traditional guarantees that supported their way of life.12 In this sense, perhaps, “Lord Randal” may also have a meaning in the third millennium, a time in which “the new” takes the form of the class struggle of the top against the bottom, “reform” means erosion of hard-won rights, and social struggles no longer look forward to revolution but only strive to protect and retain what is left of existing social and economic rights (which is why, like the ballad, they are dubbed “conservative”).13

And yet, there are not only moments of dread in history, but also hope for the future. When it seems that the times might be changing, “the new” may be perceived not as an aggression from above and outside but also as an impulse of liberation from below. In colonized Ireland, the English authorities were afraid that the traditional Irish salutation, “what’s the news” (or, in more vernacular form, “what’s the craic”) was a subversive expression of dissatisfaction with the present state of things, if not an outright announcement of revolt. Take a beloved Irish song of rebellion, “Kelly, The Boy from Killane.” Written by Patrick James McCall in 1898 to commemorate the centennial of the Irish rebellion of 1798, this song bridges the memory of a rebellious past with the vision of liberation to come—1798 to 1916, as it were:

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