An Irishman's Diary

IT’S doubly apt that Tom Waits was born in December, because the surname Waits – and its variations – derives from an old musical tradition especially associated with this time of year.

The original “waits” were municipal watchman who in centuries past marked the hour by blowing a horn or playing a tune. These later evolved into uniformed bands, performing on civic occasions and at Christmas. But when the official, paid positions were abolished in 1835, the waits entered their final phase as freelance musicians, particularly active in December.

In ways, they were similar to modern carol-singers, except that the charities waits raised money for were themselves. They also continued the tradition of playing instruments (the hautboy, or oboe, being their signature). And another big difference was that their performances often happened late at night, under bedroom windows: a “service” for which they would return the next day seeking payment.

This sounds problematical to modern ears, and it was. Ideally, the serenading musicians would play softly, which sometimes they did. Here’s the American writer Washington Irvine (in 1886) waxing nostalgic about a Christmas in England: “I had scarcely got into bed when a strain of music seemed to break forth . . . just below the window. I listened, and found it proceeded from a band, which I concluded to be the waits from some neighbouring village . . . I drew aside the curtains, to hear them more distinctly. The moonbeams fell through the upper part of the casement, partially lighting up the antiquated apartment. The sounds, as they receded, became more soft and aerial, and seemed to accord with quiet and moonlight. I listened and listened – they became more and more tender and remote, and, as they gradually died away, my head sank upon the pillow and I fell asleep.”

But they were not always tender. Here's George Bernard Shaw, in 1889, complaining to his diary: "The only music I have heard this week is waits; to sit up working until two or three in the morning, and then – just as I am losing myself in . . . sleep – to hear Venite Adoremuswelling forth from a cornet English pitch, a saxhorn Society of Arts pitch (or thereabouts), and a trombone French pitch, is the sort of thing that breaks my peace and destroys my goodwill towards men!"

And some listeners were even less tolerant. Still in the 1880s, Jerome K Jerome recalled a trio of waits who had once turned up outside his Chelsea flat and described his growing urge to “injure” them: “It occurred to me it would be good sport if I turned out the light, softly opened the window, and threw coal . . . It would be impossible for them to tell from which window in the block the coal came, and thus subsequent unpleasantness would be avoided. They were a compact little group, and with average luck I was bound to hit one.”

Unfortunately, his plan (and the coal) misfired. The only person he hit was a neighbour – “the man at [number] Eighty-eight, an Irish gentleman, a journalist like myself” – who had gone out to complain.

Clearly, waits had fallen into disrepute by then. In fact, as early as 1858, a letter to Punchgrumbled about falling standards and rising decibels: "Formerly the waits used to [sing] a good old carol or quaint chorus outside your window, and their melodious notes rarely, if ever, woke you . . . Or else [they] consisted of a couple of old fellows with fiddle and harp, who made very little noise, and what there was was not unpleasant.

"What is the case now? Several sturdy, and generally intoxicated, parties, with great power of lung, blow Verdi and other such noisy composers at you in the dead of night out of fearful and incomprehensible brazen machines." The reference to "fiddle and harp" suggests some of the old-style performers were Irish, as was likely. Indeed, in a poem called The Three Christmas Waits, William Makepeace Thackeray imagines a group of veterans from the "year of revolution" – 1848 – reduced to entertaining the English public for money.

One is French. Another is identified as William Cuffee, the descendant of a Caribbean slave whose leadership of the London Chartists earned him deportation to Tasmania. The third is William Smith O’Brien, also deported after the affray at Widow McCormack’s garden, about which he sings: “Our people they defied;/They shot at ’em like savages,/Their bloody guns they plied/With sanguinary ravages:/Hide, blushing Glory, hide/That day among the cabbages!”

TO DESCRIBE musicians, the word “waits” appears only ever to have been used in the plural, as which it survives in dictionaries. The concept of a singular “wait”, or “wayte”, was confined to the oboe, for which it was a synonym. Both single and plural form survive in surnames, however. And although he is a (very) singular performer, it seems only right that Tom Waits inherited the plural.

He has never played the oboe, to my knowledge (although his performance of the hobo is virtuoso standard). But he has made at least one notable contribution to the Christmas repertoire. In fact, this has even lent itself to a modern Yuletide tradition: the concerted downloading campaign.

The Christmas Waits are no longer around to abuse. Nowadays, many people feel a similar urge to throw coal at another seasonal curse: the latest X Factorwinner and his/her stranglehold on the December charts. In 2007, an attempt was mounted to have Waits's ballad, A Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis, installed as Ireland's seasonal number one instead.

It was a brave, if doomed, venture: even the top 10 proved elusive. But it was a good cause. And the campaign’s title – “Waits for Christmas” – at least had a pleasing historic symmetry.