Popular Song and the Politics of Musical Togetherness in Ireland, 1955–98

‘Popular Song and the Politics of Musical Togetherness in Ireland, 1955–98’ seeks to develop a new social history of popular song in Ireland between 1955 and 1998, years that are bookended by the rise of the showband tradition on the one hand and the signing of the Belfast Agreement on the other. Instead of framing popular music in Ireland in terms of separate jurisdictions as is routinely the case (i.e. the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland), this project draws on recent global musicological research around encounters, borders and mobility to rethink popular song as a basic dimension of social life across the entire island of Ireland in the twentieth century, before and during ‘The Troubles’. Specifically, it addresses how popular song—first in showband culture, and later in rock music and the Eurovision Song Contest—fostered distinct kinds of musical ‘togetherness’ in these years across Ireland. The extensive, shared, island-wide musical networks that evolved through these hugely popular genres have been considerably overlooked in studies of twentieth-century Irish social and musical history, primarily due to how Irish historiography has been conditioned by the partition of Ireland in 1921. Using largely untapped primary sources from archives across Ireland and Britain, POLMUSTOG investigates how popular song was always fundamentally politicised in different ways in Ireland, but never geographically restricted by the border. To frame popular song this way is to reveal its qualities as a paradigmatic relational practice—not because music has some mystical ability to unite us, but because of the ordinary ways that it has persisted in bringing people together. As such, POLMUSTOG aims not just to explore the everyday aspects of music-making in twentieth-century Ireland, but to offer a new model for Irish social history and to advance current thinking in global music history.