1 February 1969
Maybe you’ll get as much of a jolt as I did on hearing this 1969 song’s repeated mentions of Sinn Féin – not the current-day party of Mary Lou and Gerry Adams, but the more romanticised earlier iteration of Dev, Michael Collins and fighting the Black and Tans. Indeed, since 1969 is the year things kick off, as it were, in the north, it’s not too much of a stretch to see and hear ‘Lonely Woods Of Upton’ at number one as an indication of how Irish society down south might respond.
As in many of these dreary ballads, we hear how men die for Ireland. We don’t hear so much about how they kill for Ireland. The sentimental musical setting—jaunty whistling, fusty waltz-time accordion, cornball crooning—gives us a glimpse of Irish popular culture and Irish society romanticising the historically distant bloodshed of Easter 1916, the War of Independence and “the Old IRA” into the prevailing official history that would exclude any inconvenient current-day reality from up the road. In other words, a large part of Ireland’s collective response to the Troubles would be to ignore it and just keep fighting the Black and Tans in your head. Every society does something similar, of course. Still, here on ‘Lonely Woods Of Upton’ and its ilk, it feels like another Irish solution to an Irish problem.
