The story behind the song, "St Patrick Battalion."
In recent months, Google has regularly alerted me when my name has come up because someone has written a short essay talking about why they like one or another of my songs. Once it was a review of a song that, to my knowledge, doesn't exist. Sometimes called "the story behind the song," the essays are always posted anonymously, they always seem to be almost exactly 500 words, and they have a well-written, somewhat formulaic quality to them that makes me wonder if they're being generated by AI. But they've inspired me to write one myself, which I promise I've written with no AI assistance.
178 years ago next week, the US invaded Mexico, eventually forcibly annexing most of it, turning the "great northeast" into the "great southwest." Still today, there are lots of Mexicans in Mexico, whether "new" Mexico or "old" Mexico, whose families have been living there since long before their area was invaded and annexed by the United States.
The Democrats, also known to their supporters way back as "the Party of the White Man," and the one that would ultimately support the Confederacy in the American Civil War, had been voted into power. The propaganda of the time to support the invasion of Mexico -- it was the "destiny" of the United States to grow, the Mexicans weren't doing much with their land anyway, there were too many Catholics there -- doesn't hold up well over time, and didn't even hold up well back in 1846 either, for many.
As the Biden administration is now apparently seriously considering some kind of closure of the US-Mexican border, as the inevitable refugees resulting from the US's centuries of efforts to maintain control over Latin American resources and societies by transnational corporations head northward, it seems like a good time to reflect on one of the major earlier chapters of this saga.
The "official story" as we might call it, that there was some kind of "border dispute" north of the Rio Grande between the alleged nation of Texas and the nation of Mexico that somehow resulted in the US military having to invade and annex most of Mexico as a result, is patent nonsense, of the sort that no serious historian can defend. This is why the way the US expanded in the century following the American Revolution until it literally spanned the continent, "from sea to shining sea," is a history that is studiously ignored in whatever passes for the education of the youth in this country. Far too many inconvenient truths to try to reckon with.
The reality was so much more insidious than the propaganda -- despite the propaganda being blatantly imperialistic, racist, and anti-Catholic. In reality, the invasion and annexation had nothing to do with any lofty concepts about destiny or God or even border disputes. It was all about slavery.
Far from any notions about the USA bringing democracy and freedom to countries it invades, the trouble with Texas being part of Mexico was that Mexico had abolished slavery, and the Mexican government had made known its intentions to free the enslaved people of Texas, along with those enslaved in the rest of Mexico. The Anglo-American Texas settlers wanted to keep profiting from their plantations and their enslaved workforce. That's what it was all about -- like it or not.
For more than a century following the invasion and annexation of so much of Mexico, the US-Mexico border was as porous as the US-Canadian border, with people freely going back and forth (among those from the non-enslaved population who were free to move at all). Though discrimination against Mexicans -- particularly darker-skinned Mexicans -- was enshrined in law in parts of the US from the beginning, such as in the state I live in, Oregon.
As little-known as the Mexican-American War of the 1840's is to the general population within the United States today, even less well-known is the resistance to the war from within the ranks of the US military. Many thousands of soldiers deserted from the ranks of the military, and moved to Mexico. Hundreds more deserted and then formed a foreign legion, many of whom died in battle against the US Army in the course of five engagements, under the leadership of John Riley, who was from the occupied and starving land that most of the members of the foreign legion came from -- Ireland.
I was in my early thirties, sometime around the turn of this century, when I first heard about the St Patrick Battalion, known and loved in Mexico as the San Patricios. I remember the evening reasonably well. It was a church somewhere in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I was listening to my favorite local historian, Howard Zinn, give a speech. I might have been there regardless, but I was doing a little musical opening set for Howard, as I did often around those years of the global justice movement.
I had read books and essays by Professor Zinn, but if he had mentioned the San Patricios, I didn't remember it. But when I first was reading Zinn I wasn't thinking like a songwriter, a storyteller. By the time of this gig in Cambridge I was, and the story jumped out at me immediately as one I needed to tell in the form of a song.
I don't feel much like bragging most of the time; whatever I've accomplished as a songwriter or as a recording artist tends to feel overshadowed by the fact that I've never had anything remotely approximating a hit, and I've never experienced what they call commercial success. I've never "made it," by the basic definition of making enough money to buy a house, or even to qualify for a loan to buy one. When musicians have hits, historically, and thus experience commercial success, they then buy a house, and enter the ranks of the middle class that way. When they have more than one hit, they start buying houses for their relatives. At least that's what I've repeatedly observed, among those artists.
On my better days, though, I feel like I've won the lottery, if not literally -- the lottery of life and in in some form the lottery of my chosen profession. For I, friends and comrades, have accomplished something which many songwriters have set out to do, but which only some indeterminate few succeed in. I have written a folk song. Yes, it's true that I've written many hundreds of other songs. But I wrote one folk song.
When you set out to write a song, say one you intend to be funny, something satirical, perhaps, it isn't you, the songwriter, who gets to decide whether it's a funny song. That is inevitably for others to decide. A measure of whether they do can fairly easily be found by delivering the song well to an audience that is fluent in your language, and which is seated in a quiet room. If most of the audience is laughing uproariously or at least chuckling hard, you have succeeded in writing a funny song. If they're moaning or sitting quietly, you probably failed in this endeavor.
With a folk song, by my reckoning and that of some others, it's the same kind of thing. You might set out to write a folk song, and many people have. It the early 1960's Greenwich Village folk revival scene, it was something people were more or less open about. Everyone wanted to write a song that sounded timeless, like an anonymously-written gem that you dug out of some coal mine in Kentucky. If people you were singing for assumed it was, or asked where you found that old folk song, you knew this was the first step to the song possibly achieving such status.
For the song to truly become a folk song, however, it has to be sung by other people, beyond your circle of fans and friends. It has to be a song that is generally recognized by itself, rather than one that's associated with the author.
In the modern time, say like the past century or so, it's harder to measure these things, because of the existence of the music industry. The industry can decide that a song is going to become a hit, and this artificial influence of the process that can get a song played on every commercial radio station in a bunch of different countries all at the same time can give the impression that a new folk song has been produced. There will be recordings, songbooks, there will be people learning the new hit songs and playing them in cover bands.
There are probably other ways these things can be measured, and it's probably safe to assume the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan might have produced infectious folk songs of all sorts, without the existence of the music industry to promote them. But when the songwriter is one whose music has never been played on commercial radio, never promoted by a record label with more than one employee, who has never come anywhere close to producing a hit, never had their music used in a movie beyond low-budget documentaries -- never even had a song used for a TV commercial -- then there is nothing interfering with the folk process, as we might call it.
With "St Patrick Battalion" as the search term, a lot of things come up. On YouTube and on the Wikipedia entry, you'll readily come up with a bunch of different songs, including a great one by Damien Dempsey. Arguably, there are better-crafted songs about the San Patricios than the one I wrote, but this isn't up to either Damien or I to decide.
I don't think it's the best song I ever wrote. The melody is infectious, I'll admit, and does sound like it could be an actual Irish folk song. The chorus is good. As for the verses, I remember struggling with each one of them, 24 years ago, somewhere in the midwestern US, engaging in one of my earlier experiences with doing a search on a search engine and coming up with useful and informative results.
Even though I've been singing the song at almost every gig since then, there are still aspects of the chorus as well as three of the verses that still grate on me, and clearly on some others as well. Over time I have changed things in the song slightly, but the newer versions seem to take many years before they circulate among those who are covering the song, out there in the world.
It is fundamentally a song about solidarity, and in particular, international solidarity. I wrote it maybe a few months after my first real trip to Germany, where I was at a protest and heard large numbers of young people changing, in German, "international solidarity!" like they really meant it. And I had already written a few songs that employed the device of referring to geography to help make your point, such as my songs, "From Kabul to Khartoum," and "Contras, Kings, and Generals." I like the opening line of the chorus of "St Patrick Battalion" -- "from Dublin City to San Diego" -- but maybe I should have picked more relevant cities, rather than just ones with recognizable names.
I had also grown up, at least from my teens onward, steeped in the history of certain social movements, such as the one in the 1930's that led tens of thousands of people from US and many other countries to travel to Spain and fight alongside the Spanish Republicans against the insurgent, coup-plotting generals backed by Hitler and Mussolini. By my early twenties I had become good friends with a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, Bob Steck.
In the leftwing circles I traveled in as a young man, those who joined these International Brigades were the most revered members of the 1930's generation, a generation that was still very actively involved with the American left when I was a young adult. Among the leftwing songwriters I knew or knew of, having a song that mentioned the Spanish Civil War and the international nature of that struggle was pretty much required. I avoided the subject for years, but I eventually wrote one myself, called "the Last Lincoln Veteran," which also became one of my best-known songs, though not as much as "St Patrick Battalion."
Among the 1980's folk music scene in the US and in many other countries, when I was coming up, if you wrote politically relevant songs -- if you were a songwriter of the sort like Pete Seeger, Christy Moore, Jim Page, John McCutcheon, or Bruce Cockburn, among many others -- it was also de rigueur to have at least one song condemning all the US-backed military coups in Latin America, in support of the Sandinista or FMLN revolutions of the time.
In my earlier years of being engaged with what Phil Ochs called "topical" songs, I was probably avoiding writing anything that included a few words of Spanish in it, because doing so felt a bit cliche, and I didn't want to be identified with those people that Tom Lehrer described in "the Folk Song Army." By the time I wrote "St Patrick Battalion," good sense had gotten the better of me, over notions of folksinger fashion. Though to my shame, without consulting an actual Spanish speaker, the one Spanish phrase I originally included in the song was wrong. Later recordings have the updated, correct phrase.
Around the time I wrote the song, the man who organized most of my gigs in Madison, Wisconsin, which were also some of my better-attended ones, was an organizer named Ben Manski (now a university professor in Virginia), who said he knew word was getting out about an event effectively when he started hearing about it from friends of his who didn't know that he was the one who was organizing it.
Some of my earlier experiences with "St Patrick Battalion" were like that, involving these looks indicating that people frequently recognized the song, without having known who wrote it. It became clear that it was not an option to do a show without including that song, and it consistently became the song that everyone would sing along with, if it was an audience that was apt to sing at all to anything.
Not coincidentally, within a few months of writing that song, I was doing gigs in Ireland, some of which were organized by folks who had only recently gotten out of prison. I found myself doing an interview for Sinn Fein's newspaper, An Phoblacht, which was located in the most heavily-armored building I had ever seen up til that point or maybe since. I believe the man who interviewed me was the editor and was named Martin. I remember him saying that he was the only person who worked at the paper who hadn't been to prison.
People I knew were singing the song, and I was hearing about people singing it who I didn't know. When YouTube came into existence, people started making music videos with the song, using footage from films with relevant content, such as One Man's Hero. These videos would frequently get taken down, after amassing hundreds of thousands of views. Others are still up. This seemed like a newish form of the folk process doing its thing with a song.
In the past decade and even more so in the past few years, very professional musical acts have been performing and recording the song, hailing from Ireland, Scotland, England, the US, Chile, and Mexico, from what I've just been gathering in YouTube searches just recently. A brilliant artist in Mexico City has recorded a Spanish-language version of the song, which I think represents a better telling of the story than my version. For many of the bands who can be found doing the song on YouTube, it's the song they do that has the most views.
I plan to live for many more decades to come, but if I were to die tomorrow, I'm sure some people would summarize my life as "the guy who wrote that song about the Irish who fought for Mexico," and that's fine. In this world, for a song existing outside of the corporate-controlled media or record industry landscape to nonetheless get heard by millions of people around the planet, feels like a small victory worthy of mention.
It's probably fair to say that a significant number of the people alive today who know about the San Patricios first heard about them through my song, and that seems like a something worth bragging about despite my discomfort with the whole phenomenon, if only to hold forth an example of how a song can sometimes work, and do the kind of job a song might hope to do.
It seems worth mentioning as well that while I first heard about the St. Patrick Battalion from Howard Zinn, Zinn first heard about the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado from Woody Guthrie's song about it.
If there's anyone out there who actually wants to hear eleven different brilliant renditions of the song recorded by eleven different musical acts, here's a "St Patrick Battalion" YouTube playlist.
