Written in the H-Blocks: Bobby Sands' Poem of Exile
“Back Home in Derry” was written by Bobby Sands, an Irish republican prisoner in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh (the Maze Prison). Sands led the 1981 hunger strike, protesting the British government's refusal to grant political status to republican prisoners, and died on May 5, 1981, after 66 days without food.
The song he wrote is not about his own time, at least not on the surface. Its narrator is a rebel of an earlier Ireland, taken from his home in Derry and shipped in chains to Australia, looking back at the town he will never see again. But nobody who knows where the words were written hears it as only history. A man in a cell in 1980, writing as a transported rebel of 1803, was writing his own situation into the long Irish story of prison and exile. That is the whole song in one move: the cell and the convict ship are the same place, 178 years apart.
1803 Robert Emmet's Rebels Bound for Botany Bay
The narrator sails in the aftermath of the rising of 1803, Robert Emmet's short, doomed rebellion in Dublin. Emmet's execution is in the song, and the men in the hold with the narrator are his rebels, “sixty rebels now bound for Botany Bay.”
Transportation was the British government's answer to rebellion: instead of a grave in Ireland that people could gather at, a convict ship and a one-way journey to the far side of the world. Between 1788 and 1868, roughly 162,000 convicts were transported to Australia, and about a quarter of them were Irish. Sands' sixty rebels were one shipload in a traffic that ran for eighty years — and for the men on it, “home” became a word for somewhere you described to your children but never saw again. Our post on Black Velvet Band tells the same journey from a different angle: a Belfast girl, a stolen watch, and Van Diemen's Land.
How Christy Moore Heard It in Derry and Put It on Ride On (1984)
Moore was playing in Derry and staying with the Barrett family on Chamberlain Street when a young man, just home from the H-Blocks, sang him the verses and wrote them out for him. The next night, in Bellaghy, Colm Scullion — who had shared a cell with Sands on the blanket protest — sang him another Sands song, “McIlhatton.” Moore put “Back Home in Derry” on his album Ride On (1984), produced by Dónal Lunny, in a version shorter than Sands' original poem. That record is how a lyric written in a prison cell reached the world: carried out in memory and on paper, sung in two houses, and recorded within three years of its author's death.
Moore's page for the song has the full lyric and his account in his own words — it is the best thing on the internet about this song, and it is linked below.
Why a Canadian Shipwreck Song Carries It
If the tune sounds familiar, it should. Moore set Sands' words to the air of Gordon Lightfoot's “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” — Moore himself suspects the air “has earlier origins,” but Lightfoot's shipwreck ballad is the shape everyone knows. We have a whole post on The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and the pairing is not an accident of convenience: a song about men lost at sea in 1975 carries a song about men shipped over the sea in 1803, and both are about the ones who never came home.
This is one of a small cluster of prison songs in our set. Men Behind the Wire is the internment song of a decade earlier, The Auld Triangle is Mountjoy's, and Grace ends in Kilmainham. Sands knew exactly which shelf of Irish song he was writing for.
Want to dig deeper? Christy Moore's own page — lyric and the story of hearing it — is the primary source. Kilmainham Gaol Museum's Transportation page lays out the system the song's narrator was shipped through. On video, Inside Irish Music tells the story behind “Back Home in Derry” in a Short, and Davy Holden's interviews recorded after Sands' death — republican and unionist voices both — have been watched more than 200,000 times.
— hear us play it live (video above).