A time when innocence reigned but not for long

Country Living with Francis Farragher

It’s nearly quite jolting at times how a song from a particular era can take you back to a time of your life when you were starting school, getting your first job, experiencing the loss of a loved one or a first date that might, or might not, have changed the course of your life.

The wonderful aspect of our technological world of Google and YouTube is that if you have access to any kind of basic computer, the old tune or song can be rooted out in a matter of seconds and played in through our earphones.

The other morning on Lyric FM, as Marty Whelan was having one of his many whimsical cum nostalgic flashbacks, he played a song that took me back to a breakfast table in 1963 of brown bread and softly boiled eggs, at a time when I was poised to make that huge transitions between high-infants and first class.

This was a hugely conservative, Church dominated, segment of recent Irish history but one morning during a sponsored programme, a song was played from ‘The Singing Nun’ entitled Dominique.

It was a real pop/folk song of the time, sung in French at pretty high speed with a catchy rhythm that tended to keep us humming along merrily for the day. Initially, it posed something of a dilemma for ‘the parents’ in case it might be regarded as mildly sacrilegious but they gradually warmed to it, and after that whenever it was played, we all burst out into a humming back-up chorus.

In essence the pop/folk song was ‘in praise of the Good Lord’ and apparently through the 1960s, it proved to be a valuable recruiting anthem for various orders of nuns, seeking new members to their ranks. For a time in 1963, it apparently outsold Elvis Presley on the US Billboard Hot 100 and even put up a mild challenge to The Beatles at the peak of their popularity in ’63.

The singer/songwriter was a Belgian Dominican nun called Jeanine Deckers or Sister Luc Gabrielle, but we all knew her simply as The Singing Nun. There were many times when our apple picking or garden games would be interrupted with a shout from the mother of: “Come in straight away, The Singing Nun is on.” We never did see any images of , as rural Ireland in 1963 was a place where black and white televisions were as rare as sliced ham and pocket money. Any visits to ‘television houses’ were generally restricted to All-Ireland semi-finals and finals.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.