Interviews with Digital Media Thought Leaders

Garry Owen Lives!

Podcast Audio | Posted by Phil Leigh on August 8, 2010

Standard Podcast [5:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Five hundred years before Columbus discovered the Western Hemisphere, Vikings were raiding the British Isles. They even attacked along the western shores of Ireland where one settlement took root on the banks of the Shannon River estuary. Two hundred years later Anglo-Normans conquered the area and built a castle to control river traffic. The fortress was named after King John who was later forced to sign the Magna Carta back in England.

Download audio to iPod, iPad, and iPhone here (six minutes)

A town grew up around King John’s castle. Apparently the residents were a fun-loving sort as indicated by the ribald poetic form that took the city’s name of Limerick. High ground across the river and toward the south east provided broad commanding views of the castle and surrounding terrain. It was a pleasant place for recreation. While the elderly imbibed under shade trees youths played ball games and other athletic activities on the green, or lingered in hedgerows with fair acquaintances. From the Gaelic words for “garden” and “John” the area got its compound Anglicized name, Garryowen.

In time the “boys of Garryowen” developed a reputation for rowdiness often amplified by generous intoxication. Sometime before the end of the eighteenth century a minstrel, whose name is lost to history, composed a lively tune the Garryowen boys would sing as they staggered from tavern-to-tavern.

British troops who came in the late eighteenth century to put down the Irish Rebellion picked-up the tune. Like today’s warriors, when granted leave they would sometimes celebrate by visiting the tavern districts of nearby towns, taking the song with them. In time, other military units embraced it although the lyrics would change as appropriate to the unit. It even crossed the Atlantic where it was most famously adopted after the Civil War by the U. S. Seventh Cavalry regiment.

Eventually the stirring melody came to be much more highly regarded than a drinking song. It even became noble. But mere words-on-paper cannot convey the full meaning that it held. This video better demonstrates how many American’s felt about in 1876 and 1941, when it was “in like Flynn”.

This post attempts to demonstrate how changing media affects our ability to understand ourselves. Prior to the printing press all recorded history was passed down by word of mouth and longhand scribes. When I was a boy history was available in textbooks and, to a lesser extent, motion pictures. As Shelby Foote put when commenting on conventional historians, “No great column of facts can ever pose as the truth. Truth is order imposed on those facts;…I remember the Kennedy years – both of them – and I don’t think history will ever get any true view of John Kennedy and what he meant to us at the time he was alive because the facts don’t support what we felt.”

But Digital Media enables us to mix media in a single file, like this one. It permits ordinary people like me to construct documents that might better show the meaning to which Foote alludes. Moreover, the Internet enables us to distribute it across the World. For example, consider the way this YouTube video shows how some Americans still feel about Garryowen.

I never met either of my Grandfathers or one of my Grandmothers. If they had lived during an era of Digital Media and the Internet, they might have stored short video greetings on a server. Along with other customers they might have paid the hosting company enough money to finance a trust fund for maintaining the server in perpetuity. Such a plan could be made available today enabling all of us to connect more meaningfully to posterity – like Garry Owen.