Buried in this little historical piece is something that strikes me as really rather odd about three part harmonies.

First though the gist of the piece. The writer is talking about his own youth in Derry (Protestants might call it Londonderry) in Northern Ireland. The very strange thing is that while the economic set up would lead you to think that it would be a matriarchy, the actual set up was entirely different, a patriarchy.

It all revolved around the shirt factories (making them of Irish linen I assume) and there were thousands of well paid jobs for women: and almost none at all in the same town for men. No heavy industry in that part of Ireland at the time. Now when it’s women that hold the whip hand economically you expect the society itself to be matriarchal, at least to an extent. OK, maybe not very much of one, but you’d certainly expect a division of the household labor on a less than patriarchal basis. But this isn’t what happened at all. The women were doing all of the economically active work and also doing all of the household work and childcare even when long term unemployment for men was over 80%.

My assumption is that the larger culture (and in many ways that of Northern Ireland is still very different from the rest of the UK or the rest of Ireland for that matter) and the norms that it imposed were much stronger than the entirely local economic factors.

But back to the three part harmonies.

In the process I also noticed something unique about the women of Derry. When they sang along to the tunes on the radio they would naturally slip into three-part harmony.

Elsewhere in the world of the white man, groups of men or women who burst into song generally tend to sing the melody in unison. Only in Africa and in other countries populated by our darker brothers do people tend to sing three-part harmony during a knees-up.

There must be a thesis in there somewhere, along with the one about Irish traditional music having Moorish origins. Those’ll make the Ulster-Scots lobby sit up and pay attention.

(Note the phrase “darker brothers” there: yes, Northern Ireland really is still rather different.) I’d add that in the American experience this use of three part harmony is associated with Appalachia: but then that’s the area that was settled by what you call the Scots-Irish and what the author is calling the Ulster-Scots.

So I wonder (anyone know music better than I do?) whether this is actually true? Is it something confined to certain African traditions and to the Irish one?