Mississippians speaking Gaelic...

… when pigs fly, you say. You don’t normally associate Mississippi with the Irish speaking world. I mean the words Mississippi and Gaeilge do not often appear in the same sentence. But history is full of odd misconceptions, like horns and wings on Viking helmets (they had none). Early Mississippi was settled by an assortment of mixed Celts, Irish, Hebrideans, west Highlanders, Scots-Irish, etc., and Gaelic was a language heard often in Mississippi in antebellum days.

In the mid 1840s John Claiborne, a prominent Mississippi attorney and member of the US Congress, wrote in his journal, ‘there is yet living in Greene (County) some of the original immigrants who speak nothing but the Gallic.’ By this he meant the Gaelic language. There was even a need for Gaelic speaking post masters in Mississippi in those days. The Greene County comment was of great interest to me personally, as the first McCains to enter Mississippi were in this community described by John Claiborne.

It is interesting to see Gaelic in use in Mississippi into the 1840s and 1850s. My own grandfather, who was born in 1890, used certain Gaelic works in his speech: brogan
(bróga) for shoe, or slew (slua) to mean a lot of something. I found a humorous comment about language made by an English Crown official that visited the Marsh Creek Settlement in the Pennsylvania Colony, where the McCains were living in the 1740s. The Crown official complained that these settlers spoke ‘bad English and bad Irish.’ That was my immigrant, Hugh McKean, he was speaking about and it was his son, Hance Hamilton McCain, who brought my
wing on the family into Mississippi.

Now you would think that by the 21st Century we Mississippi McCains would have lost our Gaelic, wouldn’t you? Not so. Last fall you would have heard a curious conversation in Oxford, Mississippi, from two men heading into the Ajax Pub. My cousin, Rankin Sherling, a native Greenwood, his mother a McCain, and I met at the Pub to have a visit. Rankin is working on his Phd in Irish history at Queens University, Ontario, Canada and was just back from Donegal, where he had been studying Ulster Irish. My Irish is fair to middlin’ these days, and despite my caigheán oifigiúil and his bona fide Ulster dialect, we managed to greet and speak in Irish to each other there in the middle of Oxford, Mississippi. So pigs do fly.


© McCain 2008

Musically Speaking...

I have worked as a musician on and off in my life. My first gig was way back in 1967, as a drummer in several rock bands, that was in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana.
above photo, Live on the air in Dublin, Ireland, playing the Sin É radio show circa Oct 2004
below Mid 70s Folk Troubadour





On stage in, I think it was Aberdeen, Mississippi, playing a Bluegrass Festival, with my son Donovan. He is a shockingly good musician, several light years ahead of me. I am playing rhythm guitar for him here.

Circa 1978

A little Yin... A little Yang...

Little Grey Lizard

little grey lizard
you were absent from my garden yesterday
I am glad you have escaped your enemies for another day


Barry R McCain
19 November 1986

Barry R McCain, in the 50s

Barry R McCain with his father, Leslie Gordon McCain circa 1959. My dad has the 'McCain' look to the hilt.

From My Desk...

Here I am seated at my desk in my home located in the wooded hills of north Mississippi, just about a mile east of Oxford. Oxford is a small university town, home to the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss, as it is usually called and also home to William Faulkner, the Noble Prize winning author. You don’t often think of the Deep South in terms of Irish ancestry and things related to Ulster, but one easily could as the connections are very real, Faulkner himself as you likely could guess by his surname, of Ulster ancestry.

McCain’s Corner will be a short column that will give life to the connections between the Province of Ulster and her many sons and daughters out here in the Diaspora. I am one of the McCains, a family well known in the Finn Valley, and in times past we were also found in north Antrim, up around Dunluce way. I belong to a branch of them that came into Mississippi early and established themselves; Senator John McCain and writer Elizabeth Spencer (her mother a McCain), are both from the Mississippi McCain branch of our family.

I was around age 11 or so, a young tow head, when it dawned on me, say I’ve got this Mac on my name. This led to questions to my grandfather about where we were from and literally set me on a path that brought me to a cool wet day in October of 2004 when my car pulled up and parked beside St John’s Church in Ballyrashane, in County Antrim. I was there to see the graves of several McCains in the very old cemetery of that lovely and rural Irish church.

We caught immigration fever early and the first McCains left for the Colonies in 1718 and every generation or so sent another few families to the USA or Canada normally, but also some to Scotland to work in the coalfields there. This column will follow the various branches of our family in Canada, Donegal, Mississippi, Arizona, etc., and offer commentary on the world at large from my peculiar perspective. The McCains have remained connected to Ireland. I am not sure why even myself, just seems very natural for us.

McCain’s Corner will have a catch however, for it is rare that a son of the Southland steps up to do a task such as this, so words such as grits and gumbo are likely to pop up and you might read views that rarely make it to the establishment media. Hopefully this will be a good thing.

Barry R McCain © 2008