Songs for the Dead

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2017

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Keeners were the women of rural Ireland who were traditionally paid to cry, wail and sing over the bodies of the dead at funerals and wakes. With emotions raw from her own recent experience of grief, broadcaster Marie-Louise Muir asks what has been lost with the passing of the keeners.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the sound of one of the last keeners in Ireland.
0:05.0	This is the sound of one of the last keeners in Ireland.
0:11.0	Bridget Mullen, recorded in 1957 on Inishmore Island.
0:16.0	Keener's were women who were paid to keen, to cry, wail and sing over the dead.
0:23.4	They channeled the grief of the bereaved and paid tribute to the deceased, but the practice
0:29.5	is now all but lost, living on only in a handful of archive recordings and I want to know why.
0:38.2	I'm Mary Louise Muir and you're listening to Songs for the Dead, the story of Ireland's Keener's on the BBC World Service.
0:46.5	I knew very little about this ancient tradition until I heard this.
0:58.0	When I first heard this song,
1:17.0	I was struck by how beautiful the singer made her voice. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
1:22.0	he. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, no.
1:27.0	Mughragh, Mogu Danginhu
1:36.7	Lada wakah who
1:38.7	who
1:39.7	who
1:40.7	da hab muh who a way I kept been drawn back and back to the song and I made me look at the sleeve
1:52.0	I hadn't read up about the song and it's called Grief.
1:57.0	And she talks about the keening tradition in Ireland. The singer is Ethna Nihulahan.
2:07.0	The singer is Ethna Nihulahan.
2:10.0	But grief can be translated from the light into the darkness.
2:16.0	The song moves from the traditional to the modern, Gaelic to English. The piano is played by her son,
2:29.0	the piano is played by her son, Donal O'Connor.
	...

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