What a joy to hear Davy Hammond's voice on Ciaran Mac Mathuna's Sunday programme recently, singing "Bonnie Woodgreen". There is a story about this ballad which suggests that it was restored and revised by Ben Kiely and others or perhaps entirely created by them. At any rate it is a lovely, artless formula, as with the dying soldier telling a comrade to "kiss my love Nell, and remember Woodgreen". And that's a fine little place, we are told, where many work in John Ross's factory. Bonnie Woodgreen "Where the weavers and winders are plain to be seen, For they all wear white aprons in Bonnie Woodgreen."
Where is this fine place? The volunteer goes off to Kells bar racks to enlist, and that must be Kells, County Antrim, from context and language. And there's the further instruction that it is near Ballymacvey. A touch of Shangrila about it all now.
You can hear it on an LP "The Singers House" by David Hammond and Donal Lunny, with other instrumentalists. The sleeve or cover bears a telling piece by Seamus Heaney in which he says that David's style is personal and the personality northern, northern enough to be at home in Donegal where he has a house, or in `the green fields of Keady but at the same time he can take his ease where the intonations of the Scottish and English traditions are more audible, in Bonnie Woodgreen, for example..." David, he goes on, "is not conservative in his attitude to tradition or traditions, but radically creative. It is not the purity of the material that matters to him, not its ethnic culture content, its scholarly provenance rather it is the scope it offers the voice for exultation or repining, for the play of feeling, for human touch.
There is a moral vision implicit in the pitch of that voice, an impatience with systems, a calling into the realm of pure freedom.
"And then "No wonder he sings the children's songs as if he owned them."
Davy's voice goes through you and circles around you, and stays with you. "The Bonnie Earl of Moray", on the same record, is sombre, plaintive and will surely haunt you.