When the U.S. invaded Mexico, and I wrote a folk song about it, the story behind the song St. Patrick Battalion
You can find this in written and podcast forms on Patreon, on Substack, and at Davidrovix.com slash this week
In recent months, Google has regularly alerted me when my name has come up because someone has written a short essay talking about why they like one or another of my songs
Once it was a review of a song that, to my knowledge, does not exist
Sometimes called the story behind the song, the essays are always posted anonymously
They always seem to be almost exactly 500 words, and they have a well-written, somewhat formulaic quality to them
that makes me wonder if they're being generated by AI. But they've inspired me to write one myself
which I promise I've written with no AI assistance. 178 years ago this week, the U.S. invaded Mexico, eventually forcibly annexing most of it
turning the great northeast into the great southwest. Still today, there are lots of Mexicans in Mexico
whether New Mexico or Old Mexico, whose families have been living there since long before their area was invaded and annexed by the United States
The Democrats, also known to their supporters way back as the Party of the White Man
and the one that would ultimately support the Confederacy in the American Civil War
had been voted into power. The propaganda of the time, to support the invasion of Mexico
it was destiny of the United States to grow, the Mexicans weren't doing much with their land anyway
there were too many Catholics there, doesn't hold up well over time, and did not even hold up well back in 1846 either, for many
As the Biden administration is now apparently seriously considering some kind of closure of the U.S. Mexico border
as the inevitable refugees resulting from the U.S.'s centuries of efforts to maintain control over Latin American resources and societies by transnational corporations head northward
it seems like a good time to reflect on one of the major earlier chapters of this saga
The official story, as we might call it, that there was some kind of border dispute
north of the Rio Grande between the alleged nations of Texas and the nation of Mexico
that somehow resulted in the U.S. military having to invade in the next most of Mexico as a result
is patent nonsense, of the sort that no serious historian can defend. This is why the way the U.S
expanded in the century following the American Revolution until it literally spanned the continent
from sea to shining sea is a history that is studiously ignored in whatever passes for the
education of the youth in this country. Far too many. inconvenient truths to try to reckon with
The reality was so much more insidious than the propaganda, despite the propaganda being blatantly imperialistic, racist, and anti-Catholic
In reality, the invasion and annexation had nothing to do with any lofty concepts
about destiny or God or even border disputes. It was all about slavery
Far from any notions about the USA bringing democracy and freedom to countries it invades
The trouble with Texas being part of Mexico was that Mexico had abolished slavery
and the Mexican government had made known its intentions to free the enslaved people of Texas
along with those enslaved in the rest of Mexico. The Anglo-American Texas settlers wanted to keep profiting from their plantations and their enslaved workforce
That's what it was all about, like it or not. For more than a century, following the invasion and annexation of so much of Mexico
the U border was as freely going back and forth among those from the non population who were free to move at all Though discrimination against Mexicans particularly darker Mexicans was enshrined in law in parts of the U from the beginning such as in the state I live in in Oregon As little known as the Mexican War of the 1840s is
to the general population within the United States today, even less well-known is the resistance to the war
from within the ranks of the U.S. military. Many thousands of soldiers deserted from the ranks of the military
and moved to Mexico. Hundreds more deserted. and then formed a Foreign Legion, many of whom died in battle against the U.S. Army in the course
of five engagements under the leadership of John Riley, who was from the occupied and starving
land that most of the members of the Foreign Legion came from, Ireland
I was in my early 30s, sometime around the turn of this century, when I first heard about
the St. Patrick Battalion, known and loved in Mexico as the San Patricios
I remember the evening reasonably well. It was a church somewhere in Cambridge, Massachusetts
and I was listening to my favorite local historian, Howard Zinn, give a speech. I might have been there regardless
but I was doing a little musical opening set for Howard, as I did often around those years of the Global Justice Movement
I had read books and essays by Professor Zinn, but if he had mentioned the San Patricios, I didn't remember it
But when I first was reading Zin, I wasn't thinking like a songwriter, a storyteller
by the time of this gig in Cambridge I was, and the story jumped out at me immediately
as one I needed to tell in the form of a song. I don't feel much like bragging most of the time
Whatever I've accomplished as a songwriter or as a recording artist tends to feel overshadowed by the fact that I've never had anything remotely
approximating a hit, and I've never experienced what they call commercial success
never made it by the basic definition of making enough money to buy a house
or even to qualify for a loan to buy one. When musicians have hits historically and thus experience commercial success
they then buy a house and enter the ranks of the middle class that way. When they have more than one hit, they start buying houses for their relatives
At least that's what I've repeatedly observed among those artists. On my better days, though, I feel like I've won the lottery
if not literally, the lottery of life, and in some form, the lottery of my chosen profession
For I, friends and comrades, have accomplished something which many songwriters have set out to do
but which only some indeterminate few succeeded. I have written a folk song
Yes, it's true that I've written many hundreds of other songs, but I wrote one folk song
When you set out to write a song, say one you intend to be funny, something satirical perhaps
It isn't you, the songwriter, who gets to decide whether it's a funny song
That is inevitably for others to decide. A measure of whether they do
can fairly easily be found by delivering the song well to an audience that is fluent in your language and which is seated in a quiet room
If most of the audience is laughing uproariously, or at least chuckling hard, you have succeeded in writing a funny song
If they're moaning or sitting quietly, you probably failed in this endeavor
With a folk song by my reckoning and that of some others, it's the same kind of thing
You might set out to write a folk song, and many people have. In the early 1960s Greenwich Village Folk Revival scene, it was some of the same
something people were more or less open about. Everyone wanted to write a song that sounded timeless
like an anonymously written gem that you dug out of some coal mine in Kentucky. If people you
were singing for assumed it was, or asked where you found that old folk song, you knew this was
the first step in the song possibly achieving such status. For the song to truly become a folk
song, however, it has to be sung by other people, beyond your circle of fans and friends. It has to be a
that is generally recognized by itself rather than one that's associated with the author
In the modern time, say like in the past century or so, it's harder to measure these things
because of the existence of the music industry The industry can decide that a song is going to become a hit and this artificial influence of the process that can get a song played on every commercial radio station in a bunch of different countries all at the same time
can give the impression that a new folk song has been produced. There will be recordings, songbooks
there will be people learning the new hit songs and playing them in cover bands. There are probably other ways these things can be measured
and it's probably safe to assume the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan might have produced infectious folk songs of all sorts, without the existence
of the music industry to promote them. But when the songwriter is one whose music has never
been played on commercial radio, never promoted by a record label with more than one employee
who has never come anywhere close to producing a hit, never had their music used in a movie
beyond low-budget documentaries, never even had a song used for a TV commercial
then there's nothing interfering with the folk process, as we might call it
With St. Patrick Battalion as the search term, a lot of things come up
On YouTube, and on the Wikipedia entry, you'll readily come up with a bunch of different songs, including a great one by Damien Dempsey
Arguably, there are better crafted songs about the San Patricios than the one I wrote, but this isn't up to either Damien or I to decide
I don't think it's the best song I ever wrote. The melody is infectious, I'll admit, and does sound like it could be an actual Irish folk song
The chorus is good. As for the verses, I remember struggling with each one of them, 24 years ago, somewhere in the Midwestern U.S., engaging in one of my earlier experiences with doing a search on a search engine and coming up with useful and informative results
Even though I've been singing the song at almost every gig since then, there are still aspects of the chorus, as well as three of the verses that's still great on me, and clearly on some others as well
Over time, I have changed things in the song slightly, but the newer version of the song
seemed to take many years before they circulate among those who are covering the song out there in the world
It is fundamentally a song about solidarity, and in particular, international solidarity
I wrote it maybe a few months after my first real trip to Germany, where I was at a protest
and heard large numbers of young people chanting in German, Internationale Solidarity, like they really meant it
And I had already written a few songs that employed the device of referring to geography
to help make your point, such as my songs from Kabul to Khartoum and Contra's Kings and Generals
I like the opening line of the chorus of St. Patrick Battalion, from Dublin City to San Diego
but maybe I should have picked more relevant cities rather than just ones with recognizable names
I had also grown up, at least from my teens onward, steeped in the history of certain social movements, such as the one in the 1930s that led tens of thousands
of people from the U.S. and many other countries to travel to Spain, and fight alongside the Spanish Republicans
against the insurgent coup-plotting generals, backed by Hitler and Mussolini. By my early 20s
I had become good friends with a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, Bob Steck
In the left-wing circles I traveled in as a young man, those who joined these international brigades
were the most revered members of the 1930s generation, a generation that was still very actively involved
with the American left when I was a young adult. among the left-wing songwriters I knew or heard of or knew of
having a song that mentioned the Spanish Civil War and the international nature of the struggle was pretty much required
I avoided the subject for years, but I eventually wrote one myself called The Last Lincoln Veteran
which also became one of my best-known songs, though not as much as St. Patrick Battalion
Among the 1980s folk music scene in the U.S. and in many other countries
when I was coming up, if you wrote politically relevant songs, if you were a songwriter of the sort like
Pete Seeger, Christy Moore, Jim Page, John McCutcheon, or Bruce Coburn, among many others
it was also due rigour to have at least one song condemning all the U military coups in Latin America in support of the Sandinista or FMLN revolutions of the time In my earlier years of being engaged with what
Phil Oaks called topical songs, I was probably avoiding writing anything that included a few words
of Spanish in it, because doing so felt a bit cliche, and I didn't want to be identified with those
people that Tom Lehrer described as the Folk Song Army. By the time I wrote St. Patrick Battalion
good sense had gotten the better of me over notions of folk singer fashion
Though to my shame, without consulting an actual Spanish speaker, the one Spanish phrase I originally included
in the song was wrong. Later recordings have the updated correct phrase
Around the time I wrote the song, the man who organized most of my gigs in Madison, Wisconsin
which were also some of my better attended ones, was an organizer named Ben Manske
now a university professor in Virginia, who said he knew word was given
getting out about an event effectively when he started hearing about it from friends of his who
didn't know that he was the one who was organizing it. Some of my earlier experiences with St. Patrick
Battalion were like that, involving these looks indicating that people frequently recognize
the song without having known who wrote it. It became clear that it was not an option to do a show
without including that song, and it consistently became the song that everyone would sing along with
if it was an audience that was apt to sing at all to anything. Not coincidentally
Finally, within a few months of writing that song, I was doing gigs in Ireland, some of which
were organized by folks who had only recently gotten out of prison. I found myself doing an interview for Sinn Féin's newspaper, On Fobelacht, which was located
in the most heavily armored building I had ever seen up till that point or maybe since
I believe the man who interviewed me was the editor and was named Martin. I remember him saying that he was the only person who worked at the paper who had not been to
prison. People I knew were singing the song, and I was hearing about people singing it who I didn't
know. When YouTube came into existence, people started making music videos with the song
using footage from films with relevant content, such as one man's hero. These videos would
frequently get taken down after amassing hundreds of thousands of views. Others are still up
This seemed like a newish form of the folk process doing its thing with a song
In the past decade, and even more so in the past few years
very professional musical acts have been performing and recording the song, hailing from Ireland, Scotland, England, the U.S., Chile, and Mexico
from what I've just been gathering in YouTube searches just recently. A brilliant artist in Mexico City has recorded a Spanish-language version of the song
which I think represents a better telling of the story than my version. For many of the bands who can be found doing the song on YouTube
it's the song they do that has the most views. I plan to live for many more decades to come
but if I were to die tomorrow, I'm sure some people would summarize my life
as the guy who wrote that song about the Irish who fought for Mexico, and that's fine
In this world, for a song existing outside of the corporate-controlled media
or record industry landscape, to nonetheless get heard by millions of people around the planet
feels like a small victory worthy of mention. It's probably fair to say that a significant
number of the people alive today who know about the San Patricios first heard about them through my song
And that seems like something worth bragging about, despite my discomfort with the whole phenomenon
If only to hold forth an example of how a song can sometimes work
and do the kind of job a song might hope to do
It seems worth mentioning as well that while I first heard about the St. Patrick Battalion from Howard Zinn
Zinn first heard about the Ludlow massacre in Colorado from Woody Guthrie's song about it
If there's anyone out there who actually wants to hear 11 different brilliant renditions of the song
recorded by 11 different musical acts, I have a St. Patrick Battalion playlist up on my YouTube channel now