Landscapes and Music

We have had two days of pub rock from a beer festival here.  Not bad music and not badly played, but dull, old-fashioned, run of the mill.  Predictable, obvious.  The only piece that brought me up short was the Irish famine ballad 'The Fields of Athenry'.  It may sound obvious and predictable to play Irish folk music to an audience of beer  drinkers, but the context made me pause.  I have always heard Irish folk in (Liverpool) pubs, where it has real resonance as the music of poverty, despair and above all exile; but listening in Wales it had anti-colonial echoes, the music of history.  And I was reminded that even in the souvenir shops of Dublin this music was the sound of the country, that however weary and jaded the sound at least old songs and therefore historical memories were being kept alive, along with the skills to play traditional instruments.  How to maintain this without the overwhelming sense of political injustice (and even horror) is the key; but the Irish seem to have managed it.  

And I have been thinking about landscapes and music with regard to Liverpool in another context.  It always fascinated me as a child that anyone outside Liverpool listened to the Beatles, as they seemed so rooted in the city.  Their songs are full of references to landscapes and real places, along with the word play that characterises the city.  Why would anyone in America listen to that?  A strange idea, I know.