‘Is this song a rebel song?’: Republican legitimacy and the contested narratives of the Irish revolutionary soundscape

Abstract

This article will demonstrate how the diverse body of musical narratives broadly collectivised as ‘Irish rebel songs’ exhibit multi-layered categorisation difficulties beyond those typically pertaining to the wider canon of traditional folksong. Due to the systemic, often febrile, contestation surrounding ideological legitimacy within the Irish national struggle, such texts must necessarily navigate multiple historico-political complexities, foremost of which is the dogmatically essentialised, yet organisationally splintered, tradition of physical-force Irish Republicanism. Such disputed ideological demarcations encourage a notable subjectivity in terms of how rebel songs are viewed from both musicological and political perspectives in Ireland to the present, a liminality reflected in the ability of such texts to reside under multiple categorisation markers simultaneously. This article will further consider the propensity of Irish rebel song narratives to shift ideological locations with relative ease, thus further adding to the inherent difficulties of establishing any consistent classification parameters for the Irish revolutionary soundscape.

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