By Ira Maine
It will come as a severe shock then to realize that the aforementioned ‘Danny Boy’ is not what it appears to be be, and that unforgivable liberties have been taken with this iconic and whiskey fumed classic (more respectably known, amongst West Britons as ‘The Londonderry Air’.)
To explain, to make you aware of this shameless misappropriation, should only take a moment or two.
Before the present era there was huge intolerance in our society of bum-boys, poufs and nancy boys. This was especially true in the city of Doire, or Derry, in Northern Ireland where a voluptuous and harmless faggotry was liable to get you beaten up, or killed. Queer chaps of all hues longed to escape from this endless persecution. They saw London as a place where they might ply their trade with a bit more dignity than that granted them at home. Much as the black slaves in the American South wrote seemingly harmless songs which were in fact, route maps to the American North for escaped slaves, Irish homos used “Danny Boy’ to buoy themselves up in the same way, to remind them of their supposedly more tolerant, more spiritual home across the water. London, if the truth be told was undoubtedly just as anti-poovery as Derry, but people have to believe in something and the bottom line is that, after all, there is always a degree of safety in numbers.
For those of you who might perchance lack a familiarity with the French language, one’s bottom, buttocks or general rectal area is referred to as one’s ‘derriere’. Amazingly and fortuitously this word is pronounced as near as dammit as the now familiar ‘…Derry Air’. Easily then this wonderful old Irish song is transformed, in a blasphemous moment, to a hymn to the imagined quality of London bums…
So to sing patriotically of ‘The Londonderry Air’ would have been to sing secretly and surreptitiously (if I’m not mistaken) of longing to be joined, in a London place of convenience,, with fellow shirt lifters, arse-bandits and well turned out habitues of public lavatories.
In the end, it is always my intention to make my writings both amusing and educational. I do hope I have succeeded in this. You will also have noticed that my work is invariably tight and to the point. This is because I abhor any possibility of a misplaced shaft carelessly finding itself inextricably enmeshed in a loosely held passage. If you see what I mean…
Bottoms up!
Vile Niall of the 74th.