Hands down saddest song of all time. Enjoy!

When I was a young lad in college, I took a class on Irish Literature, taught by a splendid chap who wore tweed jackets with patches on the elbows, had a classically messy office piled with books and papers and nary a computer, and who would play the class traditional Irish songs before embarking on a lecture. One day he pulled out a song that he told us would reduce every one of us to tears. Feh! Fat chance, old man! Well, he was right. The song was "Kilkelly, Ireland," a song written from a collection of letters from a family in Ireland to their son who had emigrated to America. The letters cover roughly 30 years or so, and reveal the turmoil and difficulty of life back in the mid/late 1800s. A gorgeous song, but, man, really sad. Anyway, because I'm not in the mood to write anything more about idiot Larry Craig, here's the Clancey Brothers singing "Kilkelly, Ireland."



NOTE: the idiots at YouTube (er...sadly, the same idiots who run this blog...ooops) have taken the video away. Boo. So here's an audio-only version, not sung by the Clancey Brothers.