CULTURE SHOCK:IN THE OPENING essay of his collection, The Government of the Tongue, Seamus Heaney recalls an evening in Belfast that must be Bloody Friday.
That day, in July 1972, was one of the worst of the Troubles. The IRA set off 20 car bombs and incendiary devices in an hour, killing nine people and injuring 130. Heaney and Davy Hammond, who died this week, were making their way to the BBC studios to record a tape of songs and poems for a mutual friend in the US. With the air full of sirens, Hammond's guitar was rendered puny by the "implacable disconsolate wailing of the ambulances".
To Hammond, "the very notion of beginning to sing at that moment when others were beginning to suffer seemed like an offence against their suffering. He could not raise his voice at that downcast moment. He packed the guitar again and we both drove off into the destroyed evening."
It is important to recall this vignette when Davy Hammond is remembered because, at this distance, he can seem like a figure who somehow floated above the terrible times in which he lived. To be held in general esteem, to be regarded by almost everybody as a good thing is, in such times, not to matter much. There is an unspoken assumption that if you didn't get someone's back up, it must have been because you were either too evasive to be controversial or too marginal to be worth hating.
In 1983, for example, the pre-eminent Irish critic, Denis Donoghue, listed the directors of Field Day as "respectively a playwright, three poets, an actor and, I gather, a walking saint". The last of these was, of course, Hammond. The description was witty but waspish - an elegant putdown. Playwrights, poets and actors matter. A walking saint is too good to be true, or, in this case, too good to be worthy of any concrete description of what Hammond actually did with his days.
His achievements as a singer, song collector, teacher, broadcaster and film-maker were peripheral to his role as the nice Prod, the jolly Presbyterian, the man apparently untouched by the brutalities of terror, repression and sectarianism.
Heaney's recall of that moment when Hammond couldn't find the strength to sing reminds us of something important - that, with the wail of sirens always in the air, singing was hard. The kind of space that Davy Hammond kept open - a common ground of songs and stories, of rhymes and memories - wasn't some kind of vacuous never-never land, irrelevant to the hard realities. It was a ground that had to be held with courage, with moral integrity and with a passion that was more civil than the dominant kind, but no less deeply felt.
Unless that strength of purpose is given its due, it would be impossible to understand the extraordinary range of Hammond's involvement across art forms, from his early role as Van Morrison's encouraging teacher at Orangefield secondary school, to his superb recordings, in sound and vision, of children's rhymes and songs; from his work as what Jeremy Isaacs called "a poet of film" in documentaries on subjects as diverse as Stephane Grappelli and Yehudi Menuhin on the one hand and the experiences of Beirut hostage Brian Keenan on the other; from his work in the theatre with Field Day, to his influence on young painter Michael O'Neill, whose exhibition, Bogland, was based on Hammond's work. No one acquires that range of accomplishment and influence merely by being a walking saint.
Hammond's work was broad, generous, open-minded and fluid. It embodied those qualities that, far from being cosily apolitical, were the very heart of a genuine political possibility.
The key to that surely lay in song. The Ulster song tradition is one of Europe's great cultural treasures. Three things about it seem important to what Hammond stood for. One is plainness. Though sectarian stereotypes need to be avoided, there is an obvious difference between the baroque, wonderfully ornamented singing of Gaelic sean-nós and the generally more direct, unadorned style more typical of Ulster. That difference clearly has something to do with the religious cultures of Catholicism and Presbyterianism. The second aspect is that Ulster song is hybrid, mongrel and impure. Its mix of Scottish, English and Gaelic elements is its great glory. And thirdly, the tradition is infused with a passionate sense of place. The love of locality is heady, ardent and full of yearning.
These three qualities infused Hammond's work. He had the plainness - in the form not of dour severity, but of a deeply honest distrust of deathly rhetoric. He drew from the way different traditions fed into the strength of Ulster song an optimism about hybridity and impurity as qualities not to be feared but to be celebrated. And he had that ardent sense of locality that runs through the songs. He knew and loved both the rural and the urban worlds of Ulster and could recognise in people of every community the same love of the place, even when it was buried under layers of rage and resentment.
After that terrible evening in Belfast, Seamus Heaney wrote the beautiful poem, The Singer's House, for Hammond, a gesture that reminds me of the way, in the Gaelic tradition, a friend clasps the hand of a sean-nós singer half way through a long song and winds it gently to encourage him through the hard passages. Heaney used the story of how the souls of drowned people inhabited the bodies of seals who would be drawn in toward the shore to hear a human song. The poem concludes with the line, addressed directly to Hammond: "Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear." With Hammond, hearing was believing, not just in his own gift for openness, but in the possibility of a better, more civil country.
