Ciaran Mac Mathuna and others will know of Sam Henry of Coleraine. An old newspaper cutting told of his travelling around the north coast, and sometimes farther afield, with a popular lecture entitled "Adventures of a Song hunter." Sam's basic job was as a revenue man and a pensions official, and according to the reporter, when his official business was finished he would produce his fiddle, which always travelled with him, and you could imagine him saying something like "Well now, Mrs Mc Cluggage, I wonder if you could help me. I'm told you might know the last verses of this choice little song I picked up recently." And he would play and sing to get her going.
From 1923 to 1939 (when, perhaps newsprint shortages curtailed the paper), he ran a weekly series of Songs of the People in The Northern Constitution of Coleraine. They could not be called folk songs, or not many of them, perhaps, according to his eventual editor in book form, but they were what the local people were singing. Sam contributed 839 articles with approximately 850 songs, all the words, and the music in tonic Sol-fa. Twenty five years after his death, Blackstaff issued a selection "Songs of the People" edited and annotated by John Moulden, but no second volume has appeared.
Unfortunately Sam did not use political songs, Orange or Green, which was something of a deprivation. Nor was the slightest bawdry allowed. One man said he had a song for Sam "but it is a bit rough" and he didn't send it. There is one song with the titillating title "Spanking Maggie from the Ross", but oddly enough the eighteen verses do not mention the name of the little grey mare who is "Spanking Maggie" in the title, and "Erin's great champion - the Antrim Lass" in the final verse.
John Moulden, in editing this volume, makes it clear that Sam did not adhere to the standards expected by scholars. His weekly newspaper medium put severe pressure on him; he almost ignored scholarship in favour of what he saw as tradition. "It was his own chosen epitaph that he would like to have said of him. "He put an old song in our mouths". He was a bird watcher, folklorist, archaeologist and photographer.
The original reporter wrote of his warmth, empathy with the people of the village where he spoke and boyish enthusiasm. Born in 1878 he died in the middle Fifties. All the songs in this book are, of course, in staff notation. A few fascinating pictures including the last Irish speaker on Rathlin.