Activist to light her 'Little Flame' to Cork this spring

“When I finally got home to the US, my mom told me she watched the White Horse Guitar Club cover of ‘Little Flame’ every day while I was in prison.”

Possessing the courage of one’s convictions is the mark of a true artist. In that regard, American songwriter and activist Carsie Blanton is as real as it gets.

The unstoppable New Jersey native has just dropped her latest single ‘Little Flame’ featuring Irish duo Ye Vagabonds, a song Blanton and her shipmates sang most days on the Paola I – the boat they were on as part of the Global Sumud Flotilla mission to Gaza in September.

“I wrote ‘Little Flame’ in a kind of ‘fugue state’ that I've had only a handful of times in my 25 plus years of songwriting,” says Blanton.

“I don't feel responsible for that song, and I don't feel ownership of it. The lyrics include many people and historical events, and it feels to me that they flowed through me in order to be remembered and carried into the future, because we need them to help us find hope and courage for the hard times ahead.”

A song of hope and courage in hard times, ‘Little Flame’ will be on Blanton’s upcoming album, ‘Red Album Vol. II’, which will be released on 16 January. With the release of her single, Blanton has confirmed a string of Irish dates which will see her play two Cork shows.

“While I was on the flotilla, we sang Little Flame' most days,” Blanton recalls.

“My Italian comrade Abderrahmane would ask for me to go get my guitar when he felt we were getting stressed and needed to sing. We sang when we were drone struck, when the sea was rough, and when we were anchored and waiting endlessly to leave.”

Starting on the night of 1 October, Blanton’s humanitarian mission was intercepted by Israeli occupation naval forces while in international waters. It was in this moment that Abderrahmane called for the guitars and they sang the song one last time before giving their instruments a sea burial.

Blanton and her comrades were taken to Israeli detention facilities. During her five days in Ketziot, a sprawling Israeli prison complex in the Negev desert, Blanton and her comrades continued to sing.

“That's where I taught it to Rana Hamida, a Palestinian musician from New Zealand, who you can hear singing in the background on the recording,” says Blanton.

“She taught me several songs in Arabic, and I taught her ‘Little Flame’. There was a very low moment in the prison where I was being marched somewhere by the Israeli military, and my boatmate Ipshita peeked through a cell door and yelled ‘a hundred years! A hundred more!’ and I absolutely wept.”

For Blanton, ‘Little Flame’ has a life and purpose of its own and is a song that belongs to everyone. This is evident by the many covers of the song that went viral; covers by the likes of Maria Doyle Kennedy, Áine Tyrell and Cian Finn, Roesy and Clare Sands - who performed the song next to the Bobby Sands mural on the Falls Road, Belfast.

One particular version by Cork collective White Horse Guitar Club, really struck a chord with Blanton’s mother while the singer was still in captivity.

“I think the big, burly Irishmen singing it with such tenderness made her feel that I was protected,” says Blanton.