Barry’s Blog # 78: Evolution of A Song, Part Two of Two

Part Two – Reframing the Message

Myths change very slowly, but they can transform when enough of us begin to consider (“to be with the stars”) our unconscious attention to the stories we have been telling ourselves about ourselves. This is likely to be a painful process; perhaps that’s why it is called paying attention. And it may require that we counter the voracious god of Time – Kronos – by slowing down our unconscious responses to the parade of both mental (internal) and environmental (external) imagery that constantly bombards us, or in this context, the military parade. The poet William Stafford, born in 1914, described his experience as a four-year-old child:

Learning

A piccolo played, then a drum.
Feet began to come – a part of the music.

Here comes a horse, clippety clop, away.

My mother said, “Don’t run –
the army is after someone other than us.

If you stay you’ll learn our enemy.”

Then he came, the speaker.

He stood in the square. He told us who to hate.

I watched my mother’s face, its quiet.

“That’s him,” she said.

The musical examples I’ve used in this essay are instructive. Consider the emotional difference between the up-tempo When Johnny Comes Marching Home and the lament Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye. 

Part of the necessary practice of reframing our myths requires deliberately, and perhaps painfully, sorting out the images and imagining how to perceive them as if they were meant to deepen our soul work instead of reinforcing our nationalist prejudices. One songwriter, Robert Emmet Dunlap, has done just that with the Garryowen tune – by slowing it down and adding new lyrics that put Custer and the Seventh Cavalry into a very different perspective. As Native American writer Vine DeLoria wrote, Custer Died For Your Sins. Reframing Garryowen and the entire mythic framework that it evokes means excavating the emotions of pride, aggression and group identity to find the deep grief that underlies them.

Dunlap explains:

“Mick Ryan’s Lament” is a ghost story about two brothers who escape post-famine Ireland for the Land of the Free, and fight for the Union in the War Between the States. Mick stays in the army and ends up dying with Custer at Little Big Horn; forever haunted by, and to, the tune of “The Garryowen.” (official tune of the 7th Cavalry and the fighting 69th, and God knows how many military units full of Irishmen fighting for flags that were not green, and lands that were not Ireland).

Here are two renditions of Mick Ryan’s Lament, and here are the lyrics:

Well my name is Mick Ryan, I’m lyin still

In a lonely spot near where I was killed

By a red man defending his native land

In the place that they call Little Big Horn

And I swear I did not see the irony

When I rode with the Seventh Cavalry

I thought that we fought for the land of the free

When we rode from Fort Lincoln that morning

And the band they played the Garryowen

Brass was shining, flags a flowin

I swear if I had only known

I’d have wished that I’d died back at Vicksburg

For my brother and me, we had barely escaped

From the hell that was Ireland in forty eight

Two angry young lads who had learned how to hate

But we loved the idea of Amerikay

And we cursed our cousins who fought and bled

In their bloody coats of bloody red

The sun never sets on the bloody dead

Of those who have chosen an empire

But we’d find a better life somehow

In the land where no man has to bow

It seemed right then and it seems right now

That Paddy he died for the union

Ah, but Michael he somehow got turned around

He had stolen the dream that he thought he’d found

Now I never will see that holy ground

For I turned into something I hated

And I’m haunted by the Garryowen

Drums a beating, bugles blowin’

I swear if I had only known

I’d lie with my brother in Vicksburg

And the band they played that Garryowen

Brass was shin, flags a flowin’

I swear if I had only known,

I’d lie with my brother at Vicksburg

The song is so resonant because in changing the cavalry cadence to a dirge of disillusionment and regret it reverses the upward arc of the hero – and the heroic nation. The American Hero expresses radical individualism, potency, production, infinite growth and racist, manifest destiny. But perhaps he conquers the Others of the world because in saving the world he thinks he can save himself.

Garryowen, after all, is a theme for men who boast, drink, brawl and fight in places where they were never invited. They are the kind of men who can (and did) refer to Viet Nam as “Indian country” and its civilians as “gooks.” And in this context, they were the kind of men who proudly flew the Confederate battle flag in World War Two, Viet Nam and Iraq.

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From an indigenous perspective, however, they – and the politicians who send them – are uninitiated men, who attempt to find meaning through the most literal of initiations.

But all indigenous mythologies understand that the Hero must die. That is, he must eventually enter the flames of initiation, shed an outmoded sense of himself and return to be in service to the greater collective. This individualizing process requires that he pass through the realms of reconsideration, regret and remorse. He must die symbolically so that he can be reborn. 

Mick Ryan’s Lament does this by turning an anthem of uninitiated men into a cry of regret for having “turned into something I hated” sung by a ghost. It expresses the pain of any veteran of any colonial war who realizes what he has turned into – or of any soul that has come to consciousness and had its innocence or false identity shattered. It carries those emotions, but it also carries potential, the terrible knowledge that only from such deep loss can any new birth arise. The protagonist’s body lies at the Little Big Horn, but his soul resides among the ancestors. The Hero has died to become one of them. The tragedy is that he had to die literally to do so.

Disillusionment and the death of the Hero can lead to cynicism, self-hatred and, for so many veterans, suicide. But mythology leaves open the possibility of transformation into something greater than the Hero – the archetype of the Warrior.  Psychologists such as Ed Tick  and Jonathan Shay have brought such mythological thinking to their work with war veterans, PTSD and the moral injuries they suffer from. For more on this issue see my essay Myth, Memory and the National Mall.

People can change. If enough people change, a culture can change. Reconciliation is possible. We recall Custer’s massacre of the Cheyenne on the Washita River in 1868. On its 100th anniversary in 1968 (while the 7^th Air Cavalry was on active duty in Viet Nam), descendants of the Indian survivors met in a ceremony with descendants of the perpetrators, whose leader told the Cheyenne elders: “We are sorry that ‘Garryowen’ was played that day 100 years ago and never again will it be played against your people.’”

This is the part of the story when those who have endured the pain of being the objects of the hatred of others turn things around and assert that they can be the subjects. In recent years the Native American acapella singing group Ulali recorded a song entitled Mahk Jchi, or All My Relations with these lyrics:

To our elders who teach us of our creation and of our past so that we may preserve it for ancestors yet to come
This is dedicated to our relatives before us, thousands of years ago
And to the 150 million who were exterminated across the Western Hemisphere in the first four hundred year’s time, starting in 1492
To those who have kept their homelands
And to the nations extinct due to mass slaughter, slavery, deportation and disease unknown to them
And to the ones who are subjected to the same treatment today
To those who survived the relocations and those who died along the way
To those who carry on traditions and live strong among their people
To those who left their communities by force or by choice and through generations no longer know who they are
To those who search and never find
To those who turn away the so-called “non-accepted”
To those who bring us together
And to those living outside, keeping touch, the voice for many
To those that make it back to live and fight the struggles of their people
To those that give up and those who do not care
To those who abuse themselves and others and those who revive again
To those who are physically, mentally, or spiritually incapable, by accident or by birth
To those who seek strength in our spirituality and way of life
To those who exploit it – even our own
To those who fall for the lies and join the dividing lines that keep us fighting amongst each other
To the outsiders who step in – good or bad
And those of us who don’t know better
To the leaders and prisoners of war, politics, crime, race and religion
– innocent or guilty
To the young, the old, the living and the dead
To our brothers and sisters in all living things across Mother Earth and her beauty we’ve destroyed and denied the honor that the Creator has given each individual:
The truth that lies in our hearts — All my relations

In the ultimate example of ironic, reverse cultural appropriation, one member of the group recites in English while the others chant indigenous lyrics that sound to my unrefined wasichu ears something like “Away, away…” And they are singing them to the unmistakable tune of — wait for it — Garry Owen!

Finally, its comforting to know that some contemporary versions of Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye include a new and final verse:

They’re rolling out the guns again, hurroo, hurroo
They’re rolling out the guns again, hurroo, hurroo
They’re rolling out the guns again
But they won’t take back our sons again
No they’ll will never take back our sons agai
Johnny, I’m swearing to ye.

This is how we can imagine reframing the myth of American innocence – one image, one song at a time.