A MARY Immaculate College historian has collaborated with rock royalty to transform a 19th-century New York court record into a new single.
Dr Richard McMahon, Lecturer in History at Mary Immaculate College (MIC) and Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge, has released From the Tombs, a new single created in partnership with Fergal Lawler, drummer with The Cranberries, and acclaimed musician and producer Bernard Butler (Suede; McAlmont & Butler).
The track is part of Bring Your Own Hammer, an interdisciplinary project that unites historians and composers to produce original songs drawn from archival sources, rooted in the history of 19th-century Ireland and the Irish diaspora.
From the Tombs is based on Dr McMahon’s research into crime and law among Irish migrants in the United States and Britain. The song draws on New York District Attorney indictment papers from 1881, telling the story of an Irish servant who was imprisoned in the notorious Tombs — the New York Halls of Justice and House of Detention — before being convicted of manslaughter and subsequently released. Beyond the sparse court record, little else is known of her life.
Dr McMahon co-wrote the track with musician Mike Smalle. The recording also features June Miles-Kingston, Marcus Holdaway, Ian Catt and Terry Edwards.
Speaking about the project, Dr McMahon said the collaboration offered a distinctive way of engaging with historical research.
“There’s something very powerful about taking a short historical source and opening it up through music,” he said. “These are often voices that are only briefly recorded in history, and this approach allows us to discover those stories anew and re-imagine those lives more sympathetically.”
The single is the first release from an upcoming double album, also titled From the Tombs, due for release in autumn 2026. The album will explore themes of crime, justice and migration in Ireland and across the Irish diaspora during the 19th century.
Bring Your Own Hammer is not a band, a group, an ensemble or even a collective. If anything, it is a faction but unlike nineteenth-century factions, who met, armed with sticks and wattles in fairs and markets, it is armed with voices and instruments and dedicated, as no faction before, to the re-interpretation of historical material in song form. BYOHammer continues to develop work at the intersection of history and music, with the project drawing on some of Ireland’s and Britain’s finest songwriters to bring archival research to wider audiences.