Where Did You Get Your Breakfast? Anna John Chiot’s old Irish songs are rescued from obscurity

Anna John Chiot, who came from the Croaghs in the Bluestack mountains, had an exceptional memory for old Donegal songs as Gaeilge – such a good one, in fact, that in the 1930s and 1940s the Irish Folklore Commission spent years recording 128 songs, which have been preserved in its archive ever since. Now that repertoire, a distinctive, richly textured snapshot of local life and lore, is set to reach a whole new audience.

Paul O’Shaughnessy, the Dublin fiddler and flute player whose meticulous musicianship draws much from his own Donegal roots, has just published Amhráin Anna John Chiot, a new book of the songs, and made fresh recordings of some of them, performed by Lillis Ó Laoire, his former Altan bandmate Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh and four other Donegal singers.

Seán Ó hEochaigh and Liam MacMeanman, the two collectors responsible, back in the 1930s and 1940s, for capturing Anna Nic an Luain’s repertoire – John Chiot, or John Kitty, was a local nickname – “would often get the singer to sing the first verse, to get the melody, and then speak the words of the following verses. But in the case of Anna,” says O’Shaughnessy, “she had stopped singing – she had lost her singing voice – so she spoke the words and they recorded them on cylinders.

These jaunty songs were improvised by the women as a form of versified teasing, coupling a girl in the company with a local lad that she might or might not fancy

“I used the written source along with some recordings of her speaking. But I wanted to take the words from the page, from the dry academic setting, into the living world, and that’s why I invited singers to record the songs too.”

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“Paul sent us the whole manuscript of 128 songs and asked us to choose our favourites that we would like to sing,” says Ó Laoire, who is a professor at the University of Galway as well as a superb sean-nós singer. “There were many songs that belong to the living repertoire of Donegal singing today, but in Anna’s own unique expressions with slight differences in the words. In the end I chose songs that I liked, trying to avoid songs that I thought others might choose.

“One thing I wanted to be sure to include would be Anna’s cumhdachaí, the work songs sung at spinning gatherings called camps, which were a standard feature of women’s work in that mountain area, where sheep-rearing was the primary occupation. These jaunty songs were improvised by the women as a form of versified teasing, coupling a girl in the company with a local lad that she might or might not fancy.”

O’Shaughnessy says, “There’s a song that Lillis sings where he put the music to it himself: Caidé a Fuair Tú Do Bhricfeasta? [Where Did You Get Your Breakfast?] It’s a local version of Lord Randal, which is a Child ballad. But versions of these songs can be found across western Europe and in America. Did they travel from place to place or did they come down from a much older source? I don’t know.”

Lillis, who says Anna Nic an Luain is a heroine of his, was entranced by the song. “This may not be the greatest ever song title, but the song itself has a hallowed pedigree going back to the Middle Ages,” he says. “It’s one of the few that crossed the language barrier into the Irish language. I knew three other Irish-language versions of it and quite a few English-language ones too. Skara Brae had recorded a lovely version in the 1970s, and Joe Heaney’s Cé Raibh Tú ó Mhaidin a Dhriotháirín Ó? was famous in sean-nós circles. More recently, Síle Uí Chróinín had learned a fine version from an old lady in the nursing home she worked in, and her daughter Nell had been singing it.

“So there we were, two Munster versions and one from Connacht. Anna had given us a Donegal version, and, again, I felt it needed its own tune for it to be heard properly and to have its own identity. So I began experimenting, and I came up with something I liked and thought serviceable. So I recorded that too.”

Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh says O’Shaughnessy’s work has reacquainted her with many old songs, but from a new source. “Paul has found a treasure of songs in his research of Anna John Chiot’s collection,” she says. “These are songs which I heard snippets of from singers like Máire Rua Ní Mhaigh, from the Croaghs, whom I had visited many years ago. So the intricate air of Cúirt Robin Finley would be from that same area and blended well with the rest of the missing lyrics, which I had not seen before.”

For O’Shaughnessy, the songs and language are inextricably intertwined. “I hope that this collection might find its way to people who might be a bit rusty in Irish,” he says, “but they can read the words and listen to the songs, and I think that can give a deep appreciation of what’s going on in the song.”

Don’t be surprised if his work means that some of Anna John Chiot’s lesser-known songs are soon sung at sessions around Ireland.

Amhráin Anna John Chiot is published by Four Courts Press