OK, so rhyme “soul” with “coal”. But you don’t need to bring skin color into it at all.
I lost her to a student chap, from the land of coal
When he took her off to Birmingham, she took away my soul
That keeps the non-racist interpretation In Winnipeg came up with, and still rhymes and scans just fine. Except that that (or anything else non-racist you could do with it) doesn’t fit with the song any more. “Dublin’s changing, the modern world sucks, my trade’s obsolete, I hate progress, and oh, by the way, some dude stole my girlfriend”. It’s just out of place.
The lyrics ‘skin as black as coal’ are not racist, they merely describe skin colour.
You are in the confusing position where you think ‘skin as white as milk’ is not racist and ‘skin as black as coal’ is racist. This is actually racist.
You say ‘you don’t need to bring skin colour into it at all’. Why shouldn’t we bring skin colour into it? The writer of this wonderful song chose to bring skin colour into it. He did it for a reason and that reason has nothing to do with racism.
Perhaps this is the song for you’ve been searching for
“I lost her to a student chap whose skin colour we shall not mention
When he took her off to Birmingham, nothing of note about anyones appearance was ever discussed, especially if they were black”
Except that, like I said, without the race angle, it doesn’t make sense to mention the old girlfriend at all. Everything else in the song is complaining about how modern life sucks: There’s skyscrapers, there are no coopers any more, the old pubs are getting torn down. But there’s nothing modern about losing a girlfriend: That’s been happening since the days of Og and Ug. So why is that verse even in the song? I can come up with a racist explanation, but I can’t come up with a non-racist one.
The girlfriend is mentioned as it’s a song about his life and Peggy was part of his life. He lost her to a student chap who was black. This also shows the change in Ireland. Foreign black students would have been an almost unheard thing in Ireland in the 40/50’s but things started changing in the 60/70’s. It’s just to show how things were changing. Nothing more. There’s no negative in him being black. Just things keep changing and nothing seems the same.
Also it’s not really about how the modern world sucks it’s just about him not liking how his world was changing. He leaves Dublin at the end of the song for somewhere else where he doesn’t have his memories of how it once was.
Here’s a thought- maybe, just MAYBE, composer Pete St. John doesn’t WANT us to agree with (or COMPLETELY sympathize with) the narrator of the song.
Ireland in general (and Dublin in particular) is a VERY different place from what it was when I used to visit as a kid in the Seventies. Many of those changes have been for the better, some for the worse, but either way, it’s easy to see why an old man who’d been born and raised in Ireland would look around and wonder, “What the hell happened to my country? I just don’t belong here any more. I’m a stranger in my own home.”
The narrator of the song probably DOES have racist attitudes. Dublin is no longer a lily-white city, and that’s undoubtedly ONE of the things that disturbs the narrator. He admits himself that he’s bitter and that he drinks too much. The gent definitely has an ugly side, and I think it’s to Pete St. John’s credit that he includes evidence of that ugly side in the lyrics.
But one can still feel some pity for a man whose world has been turned upside down, and who’s now too old to adapt to it.
The song is brilliantly local AND universal. I could easily change the lyrics and make it about Austin, Texas. Only here, the old man would be remembering when he lived in a friendly small town where he knew all the local shopkeepers… before yuppies and strip malls and chain stores took over. (Would the old man let slip that, maybe, he liked it better when the coloreds knew their place? Quite possibly… and an honest songwriter would reflect THAT in his lyrics, too).
That’s a great post. I think the line is also significant in that it provides a contrast to the narrator’s point of view. The narrator is, not so much racist, as parochial. His grand dad was a Dublin man, his dad was a Dublin man, and he’s a Dublin man, and he’ll marry a Dublin girl and have a bunch of Dublin babies. Except, the girl he falls in love with has bigger ambitions than Dublin, and runs off with a foreigner to exotic places. (Well, Birmingham, anyway.) While he stayed home and tried to ignore the larger world, she ran headlong into it. There’s an implication there, I think, that it was on some level a choice each of them made, between tradition and the modern world. The narrator chose tradition, and lost the girl because of it. And now, decades later, the modern world has caught up with Dublin anyway, and so the he doesn’t even have that any more.