(3) Salonika - Pat Kelleher - Irish Folksinger/Songwriter

Описание: Irish Folksinger Pat Kelleher from Cork, Ireland performs his version of "Salonika" (synonymous with the singing of fellow Cork folkie Jimmy Crowley) in his Folk Music & More Session Series (August 2019) www.longneckmusic.com
Excerpt from the Irish Examiner March 2019
Cork owes Helena Ronayne a huge debt for rescuing one of the city’s iconic ballads from extinction. It was a chance encounter with the Cumann na mBan veteran that led the city’s legendary troubadour Jimmy Crowley to discover Salonika, and thus the rousing traditional folk song was saved for posterity.

The song was popular around the time of the First World War but had fallen out of use in later decades. Crowley was playing with the band Stokers Lodge, when he came across it.
“Helena was a tremendous woman, she was in Cumann mBan and took part in the War of Independence. We were up in [Stokers Lodge member] Mick Murphy’s house in the northside one night, she was his granny.

“We were eating spiced beef sandwiches, chatting and practising and she heard us. She couldn’t understand why all these young fellas had a hold of all these old songs. I told her we were on a campaign, trying to do for Cork what The Dubliners had done for Dublin — singing in our own accents, and performing old street ballads, the ones that had the social history of the people. She said, ‘If that’s the case, I’m the last woman in Cork to sing this song’ and she gave me what she had of ‘Salonika’.”
The jaunty ballad is sung from two different female perspectives — the first, a woman whose husband has enlisted in World War I, the title referring to the Greek city of Thessaloniki, which was home to a British military base. These women were known as ‘seperas’ as they were paid separation allowance by the British government when their husbands went off to fight. The other woman in the song is the wife of a ‘slacker’, the term given to men who did not join the army. The women in the song swap jibes and sprinkled through the song are references to Cork locations such as the Coliseum and characters including Dicky Glue, a well-known pawnbroker.
“It would have been popular as a street ballad up to the time of the Second World War,” says Crowley. “It is a tremendous song because it gives an insight into the lives of women around the time of the First World War. It kind of died out later, when ballads became uncool, because they were associated with the poor and uneducated. They would have started coming back into vogue with the rise of folk music in the 1960s.”

Crowley and Stokers Lodge gave the song a new lease of life in the 1970s and ’80s, with artists such as The Dubliners going on to perform the song. More recently, it has been recorded by Lankum, whose rendition on the iconic BBC music show Later with Jools Holland in 2015 gained the song a whole new audience. Their version reworks the lyrics, reflecting the fact that the song was likely sung with different verses in other parts of the country.