30 Posts in 30 Days: Day 16: A song that makes you cry (or nearly)

I could think of several items for this category. Hymns from church -- traditional hymns, the ones I heard as a I child (& can often still sing without looking at the hymn book), very often make me choke up to the point that I can't sing anymore, just mouth the words.

All I need to do is hear the opening notes of Tara's Theme, the theme song from "Gone With the Wind" -- as I did yesterday, when Turner Classic Movies showed a promo for an upcoming showing of the movie (one of my all-time favourites) -- & I am reaching for the Kleenex box.

On our upcoming trip, dh & I are planning to spend some time in Cape Breton Island, a hotbed of Celtic music, which often has the power to move me to tears. Maybe it speaks to my Scots-Irish genes. Maybe it's the connection to my childhood. Which may seem odd, because I grew up on the Canadian Prairies -- but, until I was 14, we had but ONE television channel -- the CBC (something kids today, or those, like dh, who grew up closer to the border & American TV stations, find incomprehensible). And so I grew up listening to a healthy dose of "Don Messer's Jubilee" and "Singalong Jubilee" and "The Irish Rovers" -- with singers like Catherine McKinnon & John Allen Cameron.

One of the office towers close to where I work regularly has lunchtime concerts and, a few years ago, I stumbled onto a concert by Men of the Deeps -- a group of singing coal miners from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, whom I'd seen before on television with another East Coast music legend, Rita MacNeil. Listening to these these big, burly men -- all retired or working Nova Scotian coal miners -- wearing helmets and work shirts and singing in perfect harmony -- touched something deep within me. Tears rolled down my face. They've been back a couple of times since then, & I always carve time out of my busy day to get away to see them. And I always cry.

Here's an amateur video of them with the Cape Breton Symphony, singing one of Rita MacNeil's songs, Working Man. They've often performed it with her (& there are videos of that, too), but this was the only video I could find of them singing it themselves, as I saw them (although they didn't have an orchestra with them then -- & to be honest, & no offense to the orchestra, but I think the orchestra actually detracts from the beauty of their voices a bit...!).




The Men of the Deeps sing another Rita MacNeil song that was also recorded by another wonderful Celtic group, The Rankin Family. It too moves me to tears -- not only because of the beauty of their voices and harmonies, but just read the lyrics (beautiful, but like salt in an infertile's wounded heart)...!:

When the waves roll on over the waters
And the ocean cries
We look to our sons and daughters
To explain our lives
As if a child could tell us why

That as sure as the sunrise
As sure as the sea
As sure as the wind in the trees
We rise again in the faces
of our children
We rise again in the voices of our song
We rise again in the waves out on the ocean
And then we rise again

When the light goes dark with the forces of creation
Across a stormy sky
We look to reincarnation to explain our lives
As if a child could tell us why

That as sure as the sunrise
As sure as the sea
As sure as the wind in the trees
We rise again in the faces
of our children
We rise again in the voices of our song
We rise again in the waves out on the ocean
And then we rise again

We rise again in the faces
of our children
We rise again in the voices of our song
We rise again in the waves out on the ocean
And then we rise again.

Here's a video of the Rankins' version of the song (made all the more poignant by the presence of John Morris Rankin, killed in a car accident on a slippery coastal road in January 2000):