Our feathered friends feature in a good number of old Manx folk songs, with the blackbird, cuckoo, dove and cormorant all inspiring songs. Not all are happy tales of course, as the tiny wren gets hunted every St Stephen’s Day and St Catherine’s poor hen comes to a sticky end in “Kiark Katreeney Marroo” (Catherine’s Hen is Dead)!
However, the Isle of Man's most popular and well-travelled lullaby tells the story of a “Little Red Bird” and its trouble trying to find a place to sleep for the night.
“Ushag Veg Ruy” in Manx, “Little Red Bird” has been recorded and published countless times, and is a set song in the forthcoming DESC Manx Folk Awards.
Each chorus, the singer asks the bird where it slept last night. The answer: “on the top of a briar… on a bush… on the ridge of a roof”… And oh! what a wretched sleep!”
In the final verse, the bird eventually finds a comfortable nights’ sleep, wrapped up between two leaves.
At least three different melodies have been collected in the Isle of Man.
An early version is a playground skipping or ring-dance, and another is a cradle song featured in WH Gill’s Manx National Songs (1896) as “Hush, Little Darling”.
Nowadays, the most familiar melody is a lullaby noted in the 1920s by PW Caine who’d learnt it from his father. Mona Douglas included this version in Twelve Manx Folk Songs volume 2, with piano arrangement by English composer, Arnold Foster.
Published in London in 1928, this book brought the song to a wider audience. It was included BBC Singing Together radio series for schools in 1959 and again in 1986, and features on an early 78 gramophone record.
Mona Douglas observed that “the traffic was by no means all one way, and that one of the songs that the Scottish Gaels had taken to was the Manx lullaby “Ushag Veg Ruy”.” This gave rise to “Uiseag Bheag Ruadh” being sung on TV by Scottish singer Anne Lorne Gillies and it being performed by a children’s choir in the Royal National Mòd. Likewise, it has been heard being sung in Ireland and as far as New Orleans!
Where a bird or lover has slept or is travelling is a universal theme in folk song which often follows a question and answer structure. “Little Red Bird” is linked to Irish song, “Cé a chuirfidh tú liom” (Whom will you send with me?) and it’s not dissimilar to Lead Belly’s 1940s blues hit “In the Pines”, with its chorus; “My girl, my girl, don’t you lie to me. Where did you sleep last night?” An American folk song possibly from the civil war, “In the Pines” was later recorded by grunge band Nirvana.
Over the years, “Little Red Bird” has been recorded by Manx artists including Brian Stowell, David Fisher, Emma Christian, Moot, Ruth Keggin and Bernard Caine, and it continues to inspire, with recent interpretations being “Uiseog” by Belfast-based 'tradtronica' band Huartan, and a version by Austrian duo, Spinning Wheel, who learnt the song from manxmusic.com! The song has inspired art too – the little red bird is beautifully illustrated by Archibald Knox in the 1924 edition of Manx Fairy Tales, captured on camera by Mark Kinrade, animated by Anna Soloveva, and is the cover of Huartan’s new single!
Our little red bird continues to fly far and wide!
Photo credit: "Uiseog" by Huartan - cover art by Cian Hogan
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