Songs about The Potato Famine - Ireland

Subject: RE: Songs about The Potato Famine - Ireland
From: Noreen
Date: 13 May 05 - 06:54 AM

Earlier thread:

Irish Potato Famine

Subject: RE: Songs about The Potato Famine - Ireland
From: belfast
Date: 13 May 05 - 06:50 AM

"Praties" is in the digitrad as "The Famine Song". Apart from that there are not many songs from the 19th century on the subject. There was a silence, as if the victims somehow felt guilty for the crime that was inflicted upon them. I know that some songs have been written more recently.

Subject: RE: Songs about The Potato Famine - Ireland
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 13 May 05 - 06:42 AM

"The praties they were small" would be an obvious candidate, but I don't have either the word or the chords and have only heard it a couple of times.

Subject: Songs about The Potato Famine - Ireland
From: Muttley
Date: 13 May 05 - 05:01 AM

Are there any songs which deal with the hardships, times an/or consequences of the Potato Famine

Just wondering, given the historic significance of the Great Famine of the 1850's in Ireland as a result of the Potato Blight - it was certainly a major factor in the numbers of migrants who fled both willingly and unwillingly to Australia and America in those times as well as accounting for horrendous loss of life in Ireland itself and numbers of convicts sent to Australia (albeit towards the end of Transportation).

I am curious as I am a "child of the Famine" so to speak as my 3 (or maybe 4) times great Grandmother was transported as a 12 year old from Ireland during the Famine. She had been a serving girl in a British Officers Mess (I think outside Dublin) and was instructed to give the food scraps/leftovers to the pigs. However seeing as the pigs were already fat and ready for the knife and that her family was starving - she took the scraps home and fed her family and gave the pigs their regular slops instead. For this she was arrested, charged with theft and sentenced to 5 years transportation.

Anyway - if anyone has anything I'd love to hear about it - chords and or tunes would be good too - some may be simply-chorded enough for me to be able to do.