19 June 1970
This single on vinyl is one of the few records that were in my house when I was young. It wasn’t on heavy rotation as the soundtrack of my childhood or anything; we simply found it and a record player at the back of a closet when we were in the process of moving. I have no idea why we even had them. My father played tapes of Irish balladeers like Paddy Reilly in the car, but I never knew him to listen to music in the house. However, since I received a record player as a present last Christmas, perhaps that other record player and an accompanying single were presents too.
Anyway, from a combination of childhood curiosity and the novelty of having music in the house, one time I put that vinyl copy of ‘Twenty One Years’ onto the record player for a listen. The waltz-time céilí accordion vibe was familiar ambient noise to me, but what struck me most about this song was the melodrama. The heightened pitch of anguish and heartache in the third line of each verse, where the melody spikes like in ‘Save Your Love’ by Renée and Renato, sounded uncomfortably hysterical and emotional, even un-Irish.
So, it tallies that I’ve just found out now that ‘Twenty One Years’ is an old traditional US ballad which had already been covered by American country singers like Tennessee Ernie Ford. Strangely, the protagonist in the US version is sent off to serve his titular stretch in Nashville, not Dartmoor – I had no idea that Music City was synonymous with a jail, though the occasional glimpse of the Grand Ol’ Opry on TV should have warned me that the place has its own brand of incarceration and torment.
My other childhood impression, which finding the US original has also since dispelled, is that ‘Twenty One Years’ was a story of politically-motivated Irish imprisonment in England. The length of sentence certainly suggests something more serious than not having a TV licence – for instance, the crime of being Irish in England at the same time as the police needed to make quick arrests after IRA bombings. Perhaps others hearing this record at the time thought this too, although the IRA mainland campaign and the British miscarriages of justice were not for a few years yet.
Still, we’ve already seen with mid-’60s Irish folk chart-toppers like ‘The Sea Around Us’ and ‘Black And Tan Gun’ that quite a lot of the Irish record-buying public seemed to be in on the Saturday night Fenian routine through the medium of sentimental Republican ballads safely distanced from ugly reality but still lending the listener a vicarious whiff of danger and sulphur. Its mix of Irish céilí waltz and US country schmaltz makes it an oddity, and its free ride in the slipstream of contemporary nationalist tensions gives it an uneasy pop-cultural resonance. However, unless ‘Twenty One Years’ has the same sort of anecdotal connection as it does for me, then I’m not sure why anyone would give it more than one spin on the record player. I know I didn’t.
