We thank John Greene for the following superb summary of his Radio Documentary this coming Sunday evening (6th Nov. 2016) :Unrequited love is love that’s not reciprocated, or may even be rejected. Experts in this area tell us that 97% of people will experience unrequited love at some stage in their lives.
In this week’s edition of ‘Where the road takes me’, John Greene looks into the background of a number of famous and popular Irish love songs, with unrequited love as their theme.
With the help of Gerard Hanberry from Galway, a prizewinning poet, biographer, musician and teacher, we study songs like ‘On Raglan Road, ‘Down by the Sally Gardens’, and ‘Nancy Spain’.
We discover to our surprise that Maud Gonne was not the intended subject of WB Yeats’s ‘Sally Gardens’. It was in fact not just one woman, but two. A third woman from Sligo was in the equation as well.
His love for a young medical student from Dingle, encouraged Patrick Kavanagh to write ‘On Raglan Road’, which the author gave to Luke Kelly twenty years later in 1964, at a chance meeting in a Dublin pub.
And………….
……….The title of another song was taken from the victim of an air crash in order to hide the identity of the authors true love, who wasn’t really Nancy Spain.
Songs of unrequited love – Who wrote them and why their author’s romantic advances were rejected.. Find out on ‘Where the road takes me’’ – this Sunday evening at 7 on C103.
PS………….. If you miss the previous week’s show, you can hear it again from mid- day the following Monday on our website. – C103.ie
