Remembering Ruth Singing Peggy Gordon

We had been drawn together on the Great Blasket Island that balmy June night of the summer solstice by the power of invisible forces.

Australian Mick was compassed by wanderlust.

Ruth and her friend Mary had a hobby of traveling to islands.

The retired English headmaster had fallen in love with the Great Blasket long ago. He’d purchased a house here and had returned every summer for a fortnight for the last fourteen years.

The ebony-haired young German woman was curious.

The young Italian guy from New Jersey, who’d forgotten to bring food and had to go back to Dingle, ferrying across the sound twice, was about to fall in love with her.

I had stood on Coumeenoole Strand two years before and stared across Blasket Sound at the long sleeping form of the island, and whispered, there . . . I want to go there.

We all had a song that night, or a story. It was the custom, after all, whether in a pub or secure in a house on the Great Blasket – An Blascaod Mór – to offer up one or the other. You didn’t have to have lungs like Christy Moore or the gift of the seánchai, the traditional story teller. The point was to share. The headmaster told us that the old people of the island would surely have been happy this night, to know that story and song had come back, if only for a few hours.

We made our offerings by turn. Invited three times, as is the Irish custom (after politely refusing the first two), red-headed Leila, who lived on the island with her friends that summer, finally agreed to play the tin whistle in a tune she must have learned from the waves.

Paul, who lived on the island that year (1986) with his wife Marie and young son, Dubhltach, and ran a B&B, had taught himself a raucous folk guitar. His thumping song told the story of a Yank who’d never been canoeing, but nevertheless took his chances in the stern of a currach, the beetle-shaped boat of the islanders. Paul’s song spun in dizzy rhythm to the memory of the Yank’s frenzy of uncontrollable circles a few yards from shore.

Paul loaned me his guitar to play one of my old Bob Dylan favorites, “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” Joan-Baez style.

Mick shouted out a ballad about an Australian outlaw who retreated to “Craggy Creek.”

The headmaster taught us to sing, in rounds, the name of the Welsh town with the longest name in all of Europe: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. We laughed ourselves into tears and bellyaches.

Then Ruth took her turn. Her rendition of the old love ballad, “Peggy Gordon,” summons me still, as it has now for more than a quarter-century.

To look at her, you would never have suspected Ruth of either singing or doctoring. A practicing OB-gyn M.D., she hovered near five feet; just. She wore an expression of pleasant expectation, as if always awaiting good news from afar. Blond, blue-eyed, scrubbed so clean her face shone, she looked more Dutch than Scottish. But Scottish she was, a proud Glaswegian. On holiday like the rest of us, she was traveling with her friend Mary, a nurse. I’d met them, along with Mick, at a bed and breakfast in Tarbert, County Kerry, a few days earlier. We’d travel together, we decided, and agreed to meet up in Dingle. The trip to the island took us by surprise. Over coffee, we spotted a sign listing the hours for the ferry from Dunquin, a few miles to the west. We were off.

But let me return to Ruth’s voice. Not that we knew what to expect of each other, any of us. But we were shocked into shivers of mute reverence when she closed her eyes and opened her small portal of a mouth and began to sing.

Sing? Pure, distilled sound poured out of her, solid as the Scottish coastline, pure and high as wind over waves, unbroken by anything but the natural clarity of sound – not even for a moment, not for a single note, did she hesitate. Out of her mouth, her heart, her memory, flowed the words and the story of love. The notes pierced flesh. They hit bone. They ricocheted off the stone walls and ceiling of the cottage. They traveled up to the roof and flew straight out through the slate shingles. They forced themselves up against the salt-stained windows and disappeared through chinks in distressed wooden frames. They fell into the fire yet were not consumed but were instead conducted by waves of heat out the chimney into the air of the shortest night of the year. Seals on the beach must have lifted their heads and paused.

Peggy Gor-don, you are my dar-ling . . . Ruth’s confident soprano rose with the words and mood of the lyric, hesitating before falling back like the inevitable curl of tide drifting onto Trá Bán, the White Strand, stretching away within earshot below the fields where our little house kept watch on its hillside.

Her voice took up all the oxygen in the room.

She sang for everyone who had ever intoned that ballad before her.

She summoned all the force and power of words and melody, sung for ages in every age and released it among us that night: love in the world. This love would not turn its face away and die for lack of faithfulness. This love could split air and cleave stone. The power of such profound affection may even have startled the island, lonely since the forced abandonment of its people in 1953 – unsettled it a little from its moorings of rock, its hard shoulder set toward the Atlantic. Ruth’s song carried the voice of love that would not be deterred, but lifted like stubborn prayer, offered to sky and sea, to stone and fire, to both the lonely and loved among us, and to the ages yet to come.