Na Píobairí Uilleann

Chairman, NPU

An Píobaire

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9 4 15 20130930 15 In the course of using Google to search out in- formation about the two marches I spotted only one other relevant website – although, given my appallingly poor knowledge of French, there must have been many others that I missed: http://chrsouchon.free.fr/gwengamf.htm Title: Le siège de Guingamp / The siege of Guingamp/ Dialecte de Cornouaille Here you’ll find the words of “Le siège de Guingamp” in French & Breton, plus an Eng- lish translation, and the music in MIDI & MP3 formats. If I may introduce a minor digression, you’ll also find a reference in one of the verses to the main English invaders – plus, intrigu- ingly, to what I presume were various groups of mercenaries involved in the siege: At Saint-Michael’s Gate, were the English. At the Rennes Gate were the Germans. At the Plomée Gate, the Irish. And still elsewhere the Flemish. Curiouser and curiouser! Who were these Irish soldiers and why were they involved in the siege of a small Breton town? Sadly, I’ll have to confess to being totally out of my depth as regards knowledge of the wider canvas of European history during either the 1400s or the 1700s. What I find far, far more interesting is how and why songs & tunes spread from where they originated to other countries and cultures… If de la Villemarque’s assertion that Captain Morgan’s March dates back all the way to the 1300s is correct then how did the same air crop up among Breton-speakers in the 1700s? Was it via sailors involved in trade between both counties? Was it via Welsh-born soldiers in- volved in attempted English invasions in 1486 and 1694? Or – could there be a tiny grain of plausibility in Krehbiel’s postulation that the song might well date back to the 5th & 6th cen- turies when there was relatively large-scale emigration from England & Wales to Europe – including Armorica, the area that includes pres- ent-day Brittany. That was an aftermath of the mayhem & anarchy that followed from the de- parture of the Roman Legions from England and Wales and the subsequent invasions by pagan tribes of Saxons, Angles and Jutes. The ‘trade-route’ theory strikes me as by far the most plausible way to explain how certain songs – invariably songs with a good catchy melody – seemed to travel far and wide in times when ‘the media’ as we know it did not even exist and when literacy among the gen- eral population was a rarity. A typical example of a song and air that has travelled far & wide is “Siúl a Rún” (AKA “Siúl a Ghrá”, “Shule Aroon”, etc.), originally an Irish air but which can be found throughout the world. Well-known variants include “Johnny Has Gone For a Soldier”, “Buttermilk Hill”, etc. In fairness to Mr. Kriebel, author of the extract included above, those few paragraphs from Chapter 1 vividly illustrate how a good tune lasts very long in folk memory and may even travel afar to other countries & cultures. I also think that it is hard to disagree with his open- ing statement; “Music is a marvellous conser- vator.” If you have been, Many Thanks for reading this far! Special thanks to Ciarán Dalton, who located the page 13 entry in Musical and Poet- ical Relicks of the Welsh Bards. For assorted versions of “Captain Morgan’s March” and/or “The Siege of Guingamp”, see: http://song-archive.livejournal.com /14852.html http://abcnotation.com/tunePage?a=www.joe-offer.com/ folkinfo/songs/abc/923/0000 http://www.joe-offer.com/folkinfo/songs /pdf/923.pdf http://chrsouchon.free.fr/gwengamf.htm http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Barzaz_Breiz_1846/Le_Si%C3 %A8ge_de_Guingamp The same tune can also be found under the title “The Breton Wedding March” at http://thesession.org/tunes/2176

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