How Percy French turned one overheard sigh into "The Emigrant's Letter"

"The Emigrant's Letter", also known as "Cutting the Corn in Creeslough."is, on paper, a song about agricultural scheduling. It is also one of the most quietly devastating things ever written about leaving Ireland, which tells you most of what you need to know about Percy French.

The ship, the sigh, and the song

In September 1910, French and his musical partner Houston Collisson were aboard a liner headed for a six-month tour of Canada, America, and the Caribbean. The ship called at Cobh, a crowd of Irish emigrants came aboard, and once the vessel was out at sea, French was up on deck doing what French always did, which was listening.

What he heard was a Donegal man turn to his friend at the rail and say, more or less to himself, "Well, then, Mick, they'll be cuttin' the corn in Creeslough the day." askaboutireland

That was it. That was the whole thing. A man watching his country disappear and thinking about the harvest he would never stand in again, because the corn cutting in Creeslough was not farm labor so much as a village-wide party, and he had just missed it forever. Writing on IrishCentral, Percy French scholar Bernadette Lowry notes that emigrants of that era rarely returned, so these departures functioned as a kind of bereavement. French was so struck by the line that he built a song around it, and he handed the refrain to a young fellow writing home to his friend Dan, telling him to mind the girl he left behind and, if at all possible, to discourage the local competition.

The result is funny for three verses, and then it is not funny at all, which is the trick French pulled off better than almost anyone. The narrator jokes about asking the captain to turn the ship around. He brags about the fancy dinner and then admits he would trade the entire banquet for a wooden spoon, a pot of stirabout, and Katty Farrell making the tea. By the final verse, he blames the salt water for what is happening to his eyes, and nobody in the room believes him.

Who was Percy French?

William Percy French was born on May 1, 1854, at Cloonyquin House near Tulsk in County Roscommon, the third of nine children of an Anglo-Irish landlord. He was educated in England and at Foyle College in Derry before landing at Trinity College Dublin, where in 1877 he wrote his first hit, "Abdul Abulbul Amir," for a smoking concert. He borrowed five pounds, printed 200 copies, sold them at half a crown each, and felt like a millionaire for roughly a fortnight. Then he forgot to register the copyright, the song was pirated across the planet, and the royalties were only restored to his family decades after his death.

He qualified as a civil engineer and in 1883 joined the Board of Works in County Cavan with the magnificently unglamorous title of Inspector of Drains. Cavan turned out to be his creative golden age. He painted constantly, founded a sketching club and a comic troupe called the Kinnepottle Komics, and wrote some of his best songs, including "Phil the Fluter's Ball." When the Board cut staff, he turned to journalism as editor of a comic weekly called The Jarvey, and when that folded, he became, almost by accident, a full-time entertainer at the age of about 40.

He was a watercolorist of real standing, an obsessive cyclist who toured Ireland with his paints strapped to the bike, and a man who announced his move to a house on the Dublin canal with the note "We have come to live by the canal, do drop in". His first wife, Ethel, died a day after their first wedding anniversary in 1891, a loss that surfaces years later in the aching "Woods of Gortnamona." He married Helen Sheldon in 1894, had three daughters, moved to London in 1900 for work, and spent the rest of his life missing Ireland in print. 

Along the way, he gave the world "The Mountains of Mourne," "Come Back Paddy Reilly to Ballyjamesduff," "Are Ye Right There Michael," "Slattery's Mounted Foot," and around 80 songs in total. James Joyce was so taken with him that "Phil the Fluter's Ball" is referenced 26 times in "Finnegans Wake." His biographer, James N. Healy, called him "possibly the greatest and certainly the most prolific writer of comic songs" in the Irish ballad tradition.

He died of pneumonia in Formby, near Liverpool, on January 24, 1920, at the age of 65, and he died poor, owed a fortune in royalties he never saw.

Creeslough claims it, and fair enough

The village has never let go of the song, and the song has never let go of the village. When the Creeslough Community Association unveiled a memorial to corn cutting, chairperson Majella McFadden gave credit where the locals feel it belongs, laughing that "it was Creeslough's Bridie Gallagher who made it famous". Gallagher, born near Creeslough in 1924, went on to become arguably Ireland's first international pop star, and her version is the one that traveled in suitcases to Boston, Glasgow, and Sydney. donegalnews

A century on, a Percy French song about missing the harvest still does exactly what it was built to do, which is ambush you somewhere around verse four.

Listen to "The Emigrant's Letter" and other Percy French songs on our Spotify below: 

Here are the lyrics to "The Emigrant's Letter":

I'm takin' the pen in me hand
To tell you we're just out o' sight o' land;
In the grand Allan liner we're sailin' in style,
But we're sailin' away from the Emerald Isle;
And a long sort o' sigh seemed to rise from us all
As the waves hid the last bit of Donegal.
Och! it's well to be you that is takin' yer tay.
Where they're cuttin' corn in Creeshla the day.

I spoke to the captain, he won't turn her round,
And if I swum back I'd be apt to be drowned,
So here I must stay, oh! I've no cause to fret,
For their dinner was what you might call a banquet.
But though it is 'sumpchus,' I'd swop the whole lot,
For the ould wooden spoon and the stirabout pot;
And sweet Katty Farrell a-wettin' the tay
Where they're cuttin' the corn in Creeshla the day!

If Katey is courted by Patsey or Mick,
Put a word in for me with a lump of stick,
Don't kill Patsey outright, he has no sort of chance,
But Mickey's a rogue you might murder at wance;
For Katey might think as the longer she waits
A boy in the hand is worth two in the States;
And she'll promise to honour, to love and obey
Some robber that's roamin' round Creeshla the day.

Goodbye to you Dan, there's no more to be said,
And I think the salt wather's got to me head,
For it dreeps from me eyes when I call to me mind,
The friends and the colleen I'm leavin' behind;
Oh, Danny, she'll wait; whin I bid her good-bye,
There was just the laste ta.