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My Grief On The Sea (single version)

by Bring Your Own Hammer presents

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about

Bring Your Own Hammer are delighted to present this special single version of the title track from our album, My Grief on the Sea, by Michelle O’Rourke. It is a love song and was translated by the Irish language scholar Douglas Hyde (1860-1949) after he heard it performed in Irish. Hyde noted that he received the song from a woman named Biddy Crummey 'who was living in a hut in the midst of a bog in the County Roscommon’. He also described her as ‘clothed in rags and shrivelled with smoke and age like a mummy’ and reported that she lived with her daughter. Beyond that, we know little about ‘Biddy Crummey’ (in Irish: Bríd Nic Mhuiris Rua). In the 1911 census, she is recorded as being 73 years old, Roscommon born, single, illiterate, bilingual and a Catholic. Hyde first heard her perform the song in 1877 and published it in Abhráin Ghrádh Chúige Connacht/Love Songs of Connacht in 1893. The release of this single, alongside its companion song, Swift Sail Flaming by Mike Smalle and Carol Keogh, marks the beginning of a new Bring Your Own Hammer series where we ask composers, singers and musicians to interpret the work of Irish writers from the long nineteenth century (1789-1920).

lyrics

My grief on the sea,

How the waves of it roll!

For they heave between me

And the love of my soul!



Abandon’d, forsaken,

To grief and to care,

Will the sea ever waken

Relief from despair?



My grief on the sea,

How the waves of it roll!

For they heave between me

And the love of my soul!



Were I and my darling—

O heart-bitter wound!—

On board of the ship

For America bound.



My grief on the sea,

How the waves of it roll!

For they heave between me

And the love of my soul!



On a green bed of rushes

All last night I lay,

And I flung it abroad

With the heat of the day.



And my Love came behind me,

He came from the South;

His breast to my bosom,

His mouth to my mouth.



(Progress is slow, out on the flow / My love comes to me /From the sea, to me’).

credits

released April 5, 2024
Credits:
Michelle O’Rourke: vocals & keyboard
Engineered & Produced by Seán Mac Erlaine
Words by Douglas Hyde
Music & additional lyrics by Michelle O’Rourke
Publishing: Copyright Control.
Sleeve: Paul Callanan with Richard McMahon

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all rights reserved

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Bring Your Own Hammer presents Limerick, Ireland

Bring Your Own Hammer is not a band, a group, an ensemble or even a collective. If anything, it is a faction but unlike nineteenth-century factions, who met, armed with sticks and wattles in fairs and markets, it is armed with voices and instruments and dedicated, as no faction before, to the re-interpretation of historical material in song form. ... more

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