Three Chords And The Truth

a post from last year...
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When I first started reading the novels of James Lee Burke, Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurty, Daniel Woodrell, Carson McCullers and William Faulkner it didn't initially occur to me how strange it was that I understood all the dialect words. Burke and McMurty's great westerns and McCarthy's early books set in rural Tennessee often used such Ulster Scots colloquialisms as "sleekit," "skitter," "shite," "piece," (for bread or a snack) "wean," "fixin," "crittur," etc. all of which were very familiar to me growing up in Northern Ireland. Later I understood why this was so. Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee books in particular paint a vivid picture of the Ulster Scots migrants to Appalachia and the world they live in: clannish, violent, musical, economically poor but culturally rich. I liked the fact too that these novelists wrote about blue collar working people (an increasingly rare phenomenon in American literary culture). The Ulster Scots (or Scotch Irish if you prefer) migrated from northern Ireland to America in the eighteenth century taking their customs, dialect, poetry and especially their fiddles with them. It's been well said that America's greatest contribution to world culture has been its music. African Americans invented Jazz, Blues, R&B and Rap, but the Ulster Scots invented country music or rather country music grew organically from their preexisting folk music and country music has a largely pessimistic outlook on the universe that comes from the bleak, fatalistic folkways of the Ulster Scots.
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Too few people realise that the history of the Irish in America does not begin with the potato famine but goes back a century earlier to the 1740 migrations from Ulster. The best book about this hidden history is probably Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer, but Senator Jim Webb has written an entertaining primer called Born Fighting, both of which are well worth a read. Part of Jim Webb's premise is that the Ulster Scots' fighting and a feuding ways meant that they were predisposed for military service and that Scotch-Irish officers were the backbone of Washington's Army, the Union and Confederate Armies in the Civil War, the Doughboys of WW1, the GIs of WW2 and Vietnam. There may be some truth in this. Although I've never had any desire to serve in the army (all that shouting puts me right off) my dad was in the Royal Navy for twenty years and my grandfather fought in the trenches in WW1 for the duration. And of course it's well known that the British peacetime army was largely made up of Irish and Scots. Biology and culture are not destiny but maybe this is why I write (fairly) violent crime novels, not romance fiction. Mercifully though all the country songs I wrote as a teenager have gone to that great storage locker in the sky.

Winter's Bone

Winter's Bone is the best film about Northern Ireland that I've seen. Of course it isn't actually set in Northern Ireland, it's actually set in an Ulster Scots community in the Ozark Mountains. But the people who left Ulster for Appalachia two and a half centuries ago are virtually indistinguishable from the ones who stayed behind. As David Hackett Fischer shows in his book Albion's Seed, the Ulster Scots were the clannish border fighters who settled in Ulster around the time of the Plantations in Ireland (c. 1600), many of whom subsequently emigrated to the US in the mid eighteenth century. Jim Webb does a nice job describing the Ulster Scots in his book Born Fighting, explaining that these people were natural hunters and trackers who despised authority and who thus formed the backbone of the US Army in several wars.

This is the synopsis of the film from the movie's website. I don't think it gives too much away.

Seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) sets out to track down her father, who put their house up for his bail bond and then disappeared. If she fails, Ree and her family will be turned out into the Ozark woods. Challenging her outlaw kin's code of silence and risking her life, Ree hacks through the lies, evasions and threats offered up by her relatives and begins to piece together the truth.

Part thriller, part atmospheric observation piece, Winter's Bone is a great piece of work. The mountains are beautifully shot, the performances are subtle and the mood is tense and claustrophobic. Everyone is related to everyone else in this small country community and there is no firm line between good and evil. Just like in rural Ulster the one thing you are taught when dealing with the law is that "whatever you say, say nothing." Ree's journey has a gothic, fairy tale aspect but it's very much grounded in grim twenty first century reality. The film is also much more disturbing & frightening than all those tedious slasher movies everywhere in the multiplexes.

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If you want to understand Northern Ireland, ignore the Hollywood pap and watch Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday and Winter's Bone instead.