Growing Up Poor in Irish Boston
"Growing Up Poor in Irish Boston” is a podcast series, colored with humor, nostalgia and pathos. It’s about a Boston tenement kid, born in 1939, clawing his way out of poverty by being hard-working, creative, persistent, entrepreneurial and by taking risks often. There are also stories of my later life in Boston, Cambridge and New England. If you like old Boston stories or Irish-American stories or old Cambridge stories, this is your podcast. If you like Pull-Yourself-Up-By-The-Bootstrap type stories and/or down-to-earth philosophy with a Roman Catholic, funny and relatively conservative slant, then this is for you.
I am Roderick Patrick Murphy, born into a large, loving Irish family in Boston, widowed after 50+ happy years. So I am now doing some writing, volunteering and learning how to be a bachelor again.
Growing Up Poor in Irish Boston
Episode 104 Irish Songs & Four Green Fields & The Rest of the Story
Episode 104 Irish Songs & Four Green Fields & The Rest of the Story.
The song is about Ireland, presented as “the fine old woman”and its four provinces; Lienster, Munster, Ulster and Connaught presented as “the four green fields”. Ulster is presented as “taken” or occupied by the British who are presented as “the “strangers”. Makem sings about the fine old woman’s sons or the Irish people fighting and dying defending her Provinces. Its middle stanza is a description of the violence and deprivation experienced by the Irish, including the Northern Irish. The song ends like this, “But my sons have sons, as brave as were their fathers; My fourth green field will bloom once again," said she. So Makem at the end of the song, shows some promise regarding the fourth field’s freedom.
