A question for singers of old songs

[WyoBadger]

I love to sing, and a lot of my favorite songs are from Scotland and Ireland. This presents a problem: when singing an Irish (or Scottish, or Manx, or whatever) song, presuming it's in English**, how to you handle the accent? I find it hard to sing an accent convincingly without being immersed in it, but it's hard to sing things like "Get ya ready quick and soon" in flat midwesternese. So, for me, it's not a question of whether I'm going to cheese up the song, but in what manner.

And for the Irish and Scots, would you rather hear a song of your beloved homeland in a real but non-Old-Country accent, or in a pseudo-brogue?

How do people deal with this? Just curious, because I haven't figured out a good way to deal with it.

**Yes, Yes, I know, English is for English songs. Humor me.

[BigDavy]

Hi Wyobadger

Just sing the songs, as long as it sounds good who cares about the accent.

David

[WyoBadger]

Hi Wyobadger

Just sing the songs, as long as it sounds good who cares about the accent.

David

I agree. It's that "sounds good" part that occasionally has me concerned...

[MusicalADD]

Personally, I dislike it when I notice that a local (American) singer sings Irish tunes with an accent that he clearly doesn't have when he speaks. It just strikes me as phony.

But "phony" is probably too harsh a word. I can understand how it might actually be difficult to NOT sing with the accent. If you learned that song from a recording of an Irish singer, that's how you hear the song in your head, and it's very easy to imitate that sound unintentionally.

"Me and me cousin, one Arthur MacBride".... those me's sure seem determined to make you sing with an accent, eh? Right out of the gate, no less.

[brianholton]

For me, it's best to sing in your natural accent. Many (if not all) of our classical ballads were transmitted orally all over the British Isles, then to America - I can't imagine that any singer used anything other than his own natural accent.

Martin Simpson sings Scottish songs in his native Lincolnshire (isn't it?). Dick Gaughan makes no attempt to disguise where he comes from, and I have heard many many Irish singers singing songs that I would think of a Scottish, but in their own Irish English - listen to Christy Moore, Mary Black, or the Bothy Band for examples.

As a Scot, I find the attempts of English or American singers to sing in Scots embarrassing, at best.

I think you should bring the songs home and make them part of your own tradition. Good luck!

[Seonachan]

As an American, I tend to agree with Brian. I suppose there are two considerations - what sounds good to you as the singer, and what your audience (assuming there is one) is likely to think of it. If you would rather please yourself and don't care a great deal (or at all) what others think, then the question answers itself. But if you're concerned about the reaction, then you should surely be prepared for some wincing and derision. Not everyone will react this way, of course, but unless you can pre-screen your audience, then you're likely to get some portion who will. For an American attempting an Irish or Scots accent, I would guess that an American audience would be mixed in their response, but that an Irish or Scots audience would be mostly unenthusiastic to say the least. There are both global (think EuroDisney/McDonald's at the Louvre) and local (the stream of Irish/Scottish Americans touring their ancestral homelands) cultural contexts at play here that one ignores at one's peril.

It depends, too, on how good/bad your attempt at the accent is, or how far you try to take it. I'd say unless it kills the rhythm or the rhyme, don't try it; and even then, tread carefully. One of my favorite songs is "Erin Go Bragh", about the misfortunes of a Highlander in the Lowlands who is constantly mistaken for an Irishman (due to his accent, mostly). Dick Gaughan does a great version of it. I'm happy to sing along with it or whatever, but I would never consider singing it on stage. It's a song that relies on Scots for its rhyme scheme in several places, e.g. "And for every friend I had, I swear he had twa / It was terrible hard times for Erin Go Bragh". For me, there are no good choices between singing it as "two" and killing the rhyme, throwing "twa" into an American-accented song, or trying to sing the whole thing in Scots for the sake of a couple of rhymes.

*Of course, some folks prefer to think of Scots as a separate language, and this may be a case where it makes sense to think of it as such.

**I recognize the song is itself a linguistic paradox: a traditional song from the perspective of a Highland Gael, suffering mistreatment by the Lowlanders, that was clearly composed by Lowlanders. Something there doesn't add up, but I love the song anyway.

[Chris]

It is even more difficult, if English isn't your natural language. How is a German supposed to sing a Robert Burns song? (No, not in German)
It always makes me cringe when I hear someone ruining the rhyming by singing "two" or "stone" when it should be twa or stane to rhyme. (Try singing "A mile and a bittock" in plain English...) Probably singing in an accent that is not yours should be avoided, if "native" speakers of that accent are in the audience, or should be explained beforehand?

[NicoMoreno]

Singing in a fake accent sounds fake, period. I have it fro ma very good singer that to do so would be looked down on (*very* looked down on!).

A good point was made, though, that learning from someone with an accent makes it harder to divorce that, especially if you're trying to get the ornaments and the phrasing to match the source.

As far as singing a song in a different language: Never sing a song in a language you aren't comfortable having a conversation in. Beyond that, just sing it in your own accent.

[talasiga]

....Never sing a song in a language you aren't comfortable having a conversation in.
.....

So how many Gregorian chanters have comfortable Latin chats?

[s1m0n]

One of my favorite songs is "Erin Go Bragh", about the misfortunes of a Highlander in the Lowlands who is constantly mistaken for an Irishman (due to his accent, mostly). Dick Gaughan does a great version of it. I'm happy to sing along with it or whatever, but I would never consider singing it on stage. It's a song that relies on Scots for its rhyme scheme in several places, e.g. "And for every friend I had, I swear he had twa / It was terrible hard times for Erin Go Bragh".

The sheer number of scots/inglis/lallans words which end in that 'ahhh' sounds in frequently commented on by people trying to translate poetry written in scots.

[dubhlinn]

I have a very pronounced Dublin accent but if I'm singing a Christy Moore song the accent tends to wander over the county border and become Kildare-ish. That's why I tend to stick with the Dubliners...or Frank Harte.

Slan,
D.

[Ceili_whistle_man]

I find it hard to sing an accent convincingly without being immersed in it

As long as you don't try too hard to affect an (Scots) accent when lines with words such as 'braw', 'twa', 'bairns' etc appear in songs. I am sure people listening to you would hear that you are not from Scotland when you sing Scots songs, or any other countries' songs, so as long as you don't go overboard and get the wrong accentuation on those particular words then just go for it.

would you rather hear a song of your beloved homeland in a real but non-Old-Country accent, or in a pseudo-brogue?

Pseudo-brogue any song and I'm walking out the room. I would sooner (in most cases) hear the song sung straight in that persons own singing voice. A lot of Older Scots songs (Rabbie Burns songs in particular) have been 'Anglified' to make them able to be understood by the non-Scots listener.
If you are game enough to tackle a particular Burns song 'Green grow the rashes/rushes' then there really is no getting around a verse like this one without being able to pronounce them with a Scot's accent;
But gie me a cannie hour at e'en,
My arms about my dearie, O,
An' warl'y cares an' war'ly men
May a' gae tapsalteerie, O!
I think the best approach for you is to find the Anglified versions of the verses and sing them.
I sing with a Belfast accent, no matter what I sing, people have commented on it in a positive way in that they appreciate that I am not from 'the South' and can't (and don't want to) sound like (for example) Kevin Conneff when he sings 'Changing your demeanour'.
You're happy when singing? Then be happy and sing.

[WyoBadger]

Good points, everybody, and I agree. This brings to mind another question: How far do we carry this "sing in your own accent" thing? Many of us go to great length to try to get our whistle playing to sound as close to the native Irish "accent" as we can...does anyone consider the value of using (or developing) one's own "native accent" instrumentally? Or is that different?

Trying, always with limited success, to achieve the Irish "accent" on the whistle...what do you think? I tend to think it's different, but would have trouble articulating exactly why.

[Ceili_whistle_man]

WyoBadger said;

Many of us go to great length to try to get our whistle playing to sound as close to the native Irish "accent" as we can.

There’s one problem straight away. There is no one Irish whistle ‘accent’ that could be described as the quintessential Irish sound.
There are just too many regional variations for it to be so.
I could have a go at trying to sound like an American, and I may fool some people who are not American, why, I may even be able to fool some Americans, but just speaking with an accent that has no geographical grounding is going to sound strange and not quite right to most trained ears.
If I wanted to sound like a Texan for example, I would have to spend many years listening and studying the nuances of the accent and the mouth shapes that Texans make to give their unique drawl.
So if I was to live in the US and shift around from state to state, I may eventually pick up a semblance of an American accent, but I don’t think I could ever speak with a ‘real’ regional American accent.
I think you could take a similar view with Irish music. I certainly know a lot of Australians who have never set foot in Ireland but have taken the time to learn a particular style that they like and they all sounded pretty good to me.
I think the secret to a lot of the music is getting the lilt correct, I suppose it’s a bit like trying to get the right feel for a voice accent as well.
Sorry, I’m rambling on a bit, but I hope you get my drift.

[WyoBadger]

I think regional variations within a country are interesting. When I hear an Irish person speak, I just hear Irish, though some sound a bit different than others. Basically they all just sound "Irish" because I am not familiar enough with the country and its people to pick out the regional variations.

Lots of people would say the same thing about England or Scotland. Or America. But it seems like the longer a language is spoken in an area, the more distinct regional accents become. For example, here in the western U.S., I could drive several hundred miles in any direction and hear people pronouncing things exactly the same as I do. On the U.S.'s easter seaboard, this would not be the case. Somewhere like Britain, it seems like each town has its own accent.

All of which makes trying to create a generic pseudobrogue all the more hopeless, I suppose.

But when playing an instrument and trying to recreate a musical style, I believe most of us are trying to create a general "Irishness" in our sound, taking what we like from lots of different players and styles and sort of creating our own sound. That's what I see happening in my playing--I listen to whistle music of various players, Irish trad in general (both old and modern recordings), highland piping and fiddling, and so on, all of which influences my playing.

So I guess it sort of becomes my own accent, after all.

c.w.m., you obviously have nothing to apologize for, rambling-wise.