The Ludlows – ‘The Sea Around Us’

28 March 1966

The Seekers had already topped our charts with the Australian variant, and the US influence of pre-electric Bob Dylan was still in the air, but here’s our first encounter with the home-grown Irish ’60s folk ballad revival. The Ludlows include a youthful Jim McCann, later a solo balladeer of considerable success, and Margaret O’Brien, only the second Irish woman to have an Irish number one single in the four years so far of Ireland’s official chart. Here, they follow The Seekers in sounding like schoolteachers side-hustling as a folk mass group.

‘The Sea Around Us’ is also our first chart-topping encounter with an Irish republican ballad – this one an expression of gratitude that we’re separated from England by water. Its tune is traditional but the lyrics—by Dominic Behan, also the writer of ‘Come Out Ye Black And Tans’—were modern, which explains their efforts at barstool witticism and West Brit-bashing. However, there’s an undercurrent of cynicism and irony; if you think about it, the sea never did much to protect Ireland from England.

Also, in such an old-style jocose folk ballad mostly concerned with Brian Boru and Thomas Moore, the sudden reference to contemporary partition is jarring – but it’s revealing. In April 1966, while ‘The Sea Around Us’ was number one in a Republic commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising, loyalists in the north set up the Ulster Constitution Defence Committee to resist the nationalist and Catholic civil rights movement. The Irish singles charts, and this site, are an inadequate lens for viewing the imminent horror of the Troubles, but we can at least see what the 26-county pop culture of the time was like. In that context, jokey retro fair-weather-Fenian ballads about the English would soon ring very hollow indeed.