Music, Pop Culture, and Irish History

I was reading Tim Lacy's History and Education blog the other day and he had an interesting post about a class at UMass-Amherst that used the Grateful Dead as a lens for studying American Culture since the 1960s. I found this intriguing for a number of reasons: 1. I'm a huge DeadHead and would love to take that class, and 2. I'm continually interested in the role that music plays in a society's culture. I have two separate projects in mind along these lines for Ireland - neither of which I'll touch for a couple years because I'm sure the dissertation will get in the way.

The first project would be to investigate the Blues and R&B scene in Ireland, specifically the North, in the 1960s and 1970s. During a period where ethic/sectarian differences became extremely volatile, music provided a milieu for co-mingling, and relatively peacefully at that from some of the material I've read. It'd be interesting to contrast the trajectories and impact of two popular artists - Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher (Protestant and Catholic respectively) to examine this question.

The second project would be similar to the way that scholars tend to approach the 1960s in America by looking at Irish counter culture. I recently finished reading Christy Moore's book "One Voice." What struck me was the amount of anti-Government sentiment in Ireland during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. I think that in many ways, Irish folk or ballad singers provided a steady challenge to the state's agenda because singers were common, played in pubs, which meant that they reached a wide array of people at little cost. It seems there was plenty of exposure to these artists throughout the island, and their liberal leanings must have had some reverberations throughout society writ large. With a government trying to dig itself out of a pre-modern nationalist agenda in the 20th Century, and a Church that often turned a blind eye to endemic social problems, i.e. both were conservative entities, that really left pub culture and balladeers as a sizable, relatively uncensored form of popular culture and opposition (film, literature, and published music were more susceptible to the censorship laws in Ireland).

These are just the germ of the ideas at this point. Any comments (if anyone reads this) are welcome.