‘The Magdalene Laundries’: the tragic true story behind Joni Mitchell’s most heartbreaking song
When an artist writes a song about a real-life event, it is an opportunity for one to use their platform as a musician to educate the listener on a forgotten slice of history, and it can sometimes be some of the most powerful music you’ll ever hear. Throughout the history of pop music, there have been countless examples of bands and artists using current and historical affairs to create a narrative for a song, and while sometimes the imagination can run wild with ideas of how to add elements of fiction or fantasy to the story, it’s often at its most powerful when the facts are laid out.
To use two examples of songs that discuss elements of modern Irish history, both ‘Zombie’ by The Cranberries and U2’s ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ zoom in on the atrocities of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, and using their platforms to condemn the violence happening close to home while spreading awareness of the political unrest to a wider, international audience.
Throughout her career as an artist, Joni Mitchell has often drawn from real-life events in her songs and storytelling, often choosing to use her voice as a means of protest against war and other societal issues. ‘The Fiddle and the Drum’ is a fine example of how Mitchell spoke out against the Vietnam War in 1969, while one of her biggest songs, ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ isn’t exactly focused on a specific event, but rallies against capitalism and gentrification.
While Mitchell herself is Canadian, she would write about a piece of Irish history during her 1990s renaissance, although the subject matter was less contemporary than that of the Cranberries and U2 and was about a much more obscure and often covered-up aspect of the country’s past. On her 1994 album Turbulent Indigo, Mitchell wrote ‘The Magdalene Laundries’, a song that tells the story of the asylums that housed what society referred to at the time as ‘fallen women’.
While the laundries weren’t exclusively an Irish occurrence, they existed from the late 18th century to the late 20th century as institutions that enforced punitive labour to extreme measures, with many of the occupants living in dire conditions and essentially being enslaved rather than employed to do menial tasks. Those who were housed in the laundries often included those who had had children out of wedlock, women who were deemed to be promiscuous in the eyes of the Catholic Church, or prostitutes.
Mitchell makes explicit reference to the laundries throughout the song, but her inspiration came from the news in 1993 that after the sale of the land where the former High Park convent in Dublin had been, an unmarked mass grave containing the bodies of 130 former inmates of a laundry was uncovered. The institutions became widely discussed again in light of this discovery, and Mitchell’s song touches on the awful situations that some of the women, who in many cases were victims of abuse, were forced into at the laundries.
Speaking after being presented with a ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ by the Saskatchewan Recording Industry Association in 1993, Mitchell performed the then unreleased song to an audience, explaining the context and inspiration behind the song.
“The touching thing about it,” explained Mitchell, “Was to me that unmarried women in some very, very moralistic parishes, could be sentenced to a life of paleless drudgery under Dickens-like conditions for life, simply because they were unmarried and the men were looking at them.”
While the subject matter of the song is incredibly bleak, Mitchell was able to laugh about how harrowing her lyrics were, saying, “I took these nice changes, and I put this rather tragic text to it.”
It’s a powerful and often overlooked moment from Mitchell’s late career and a story that really ought to get significantly more attention in history books, which are known for glossing over some of the worst aspects of what a nation has subjected its people to in the past while making little apology for its maltreatment of citizens.
