Title: ‘Gar O’Donnell and the Philadelphia’: Traditional Song and ‘The Irish Showband’ in Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964)
Abstract: As Fintan Walsh and Sara Brady have advocated: “in the case of Irish culture, […] orality has played a far greater historical and sociocultural role than ‘text’”; consequently song has been integral to the construction and performance of Irish identities. This in turn, has resulted in a prevalence of song-forms within the Irish play. For this reason, rather than treating the songs as mere embellishments to the dramatic work, I hypothesize that songs constitute accretions, or repositories of ‘social memory,’ with the potential to profoundly affect an audience’s reception. In this essay, I examine Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), a play which many observers contend, dramatized Ireland’s transition in the early 1960s, from de Valeran traditionalism to the modernisation espoused by Seán Lemass. Through offering a close reading of the play, and drawing upon a range of sources to contextualise the discourse, the essay analyses Friel’s application of song to argue that the play, in fact, reflected Ireland’s entry into a globalized modern age characterized by systems of cultural exchange, which lay outside the purview of political sanctions. Central to the argument is Friel’s multilayered juxtaposition of traditional Irish song, with American influenced popular music. This connotes a cultural agon embodied within the protagonist, Gar O’Donnell, which in turn commented upon a young generation’s abnegation of Irish traditional song (and its associations with an old order), and their embracement of a fluid and dynamic American culture, epitomised by the success of the Irish Showbands in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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