4/3/2023 0 Comments Carrickfergus song meaning![]() A small group of friends gathered to see her leave. A quarter of a century later, I hear this song again, rising spontaneously through the eucalypts as my dear friend’s ravaged and wilted body is carried solemnly out of her home. Carrickfergus was the highlight of this heartbreaking album, a tune of transmutation, drunken courage, deep longing, love and death. The Water is Wide reappeared a year later in the form of Carrickfergus on a Bryan Ferry record. As she did so many times, Kate soothed my nerves of doubt by offering enthusiastic belief in me and my ability to take on something new. We were in a long wood cabin, in the foggy hills of Launching Place, on a break from workshopping a high school play. ![]() I accompanied Kate, my drama teacher, as she sang it for my classmates. ![]() I didn’t sing, but sat nervously strumming my guitar, a no-name, hand-me-down with a thin sound and easy action. It was the first song I worked out by ear and the first song I performed to an audience. Life at home was often difficult but when he played his records there was a lull in the chaos, a soothing. I heard The Water is Wide as a small child when my father went through his Seekers phase, the soft melody and lilting lyrics perfectly accessible to my young ears. At some point The Water is Wide made the journey it sings of, crossing from Scotland to Ireland via the North Channel and morphing into a composition called Carrickfergus. It carries countless lyrical and melodic variations with its original composer lost in the sea mists of the long, long ago. It dates back to a tune we now call The Water is Wide. The song’s history, like so many folk songs, could fill a small book. Maybe I first heard flecks of this tune centuries before my birth as it was sung with lust and vigour in some damp Scottish public house in Wick or Castleton or Glamis by an unknown ancestor over dark ale and log fire. It hosts an eternal cycle ‑ rain, creek, river, bay and sea – water lifted by the sun before falling back to earth again. ![]() The ocean contains infinite droplets, collected from a multitude of tributaries. You cannot step into the same river twice – Heraclitus. (O’er) The Sea in the British Isles, Long Before I was Born and Many Times After. ![]()
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