Van Morrison + The Band = good
It’s from The Last Waltz concert, which was the last performance The Band did together. Martin Scorsese directed a documentary using the footage from this concert. There are tons of clips from this documentary on Youtube.
Today, we would be singing about the Roma or Romani in their caravans, but I think that Van Morrison actually wrote this song about Irish Tinkers or Travellers, which are sometimes called Gypsies. They aren’t Roma. They are nomadic ethnic Irish people. They just happen to live like the Roma.
I am such a HUGE fan!
You can see pictures of gypsy caravans on bigskygypsy.com. A Mayo Druid has some pictures of caravans — with dogs http://amayodruid.blogspot.com/2011/08/irish-travellers.html, although the information on the Traveller dna is somewhat out of date — the Irish Travellers are a distinct group in Ireland — if you’re interested, look up the program from RTÉ this year, with presenter Francie Barrett (Olympic boxer and Traveller) which shows a dna study.
Both the Roma and the Irish Travellers used these horse-drawn caravans.
The Irish Travellers are also famous for breeding lurchers and terriers. The terriers were often tied to the wagon to warn of visitors approaching. Our terriers come from Traveller lines — although not exclusively from them. And of course the gypsy cob or vanner horse has evolved into a really gorgeous breed in the past decades. They supposedly have really great temperaments too.
These caravans are mostly used for tourist holidays now.
Actually, the Mayo druid has some really good information on traveller ethnicity, and I take back the “out of date” comment! But the dna study done by Francie Barrett is really good.
There are a lot of Irish Travellers near us, including the community caught up in the Dale Farm mess, along with some Romani living there too. (Then there are the other Traveller communities in Britain, and the ones who have kept identifying as Travellers since their ancestors got transported to the colonies…) Things are still bad enough that several people have acted surprised when I treated them politely like anyone else. :( Very interesting link to the Mayo Druid site, BTW!
Sorry about the improperly closed tag there–I’d fix it if I could!
That’s very bad news.
The actual Romani people in Romania are treated even worse.
There are lots of people of Traveller ancestry in the US. In South Carolina, there are well established communities: http://sciway3.net/clark/freemoors/travellers.html
These campaigns are really shocking if you’re in North America, but they are very real in Europe. I saw one book from the 70s that my partner bought because it had a picture of his family, and the ending was really depressing. It suggested that they way forward was for young Travellers to emigrate to places where their mannerisms wouldn’t give them away.
The reason why I think Morrison is singing about Irish Travellers in this song is that he is from Northern Ireland. The song was written when he lived in Upstate New York, but a lot of his stuff has references to both Northern and Southern Ireland.