Sinéad O'Connor was our freedom singer, our keener and our feminist killjoy
Many of the tributes to rock icon Sinéad O'Connor, who died last week at 56, revisit the greatest hits of her four decades of controversies and scandals. But in the past week, I've found myself returning to a less controversial (and lesser seen) performance: O'Connor's 1993 take on Sebastian Temple's "Make Me a Channel of Your Peace," otherwise known as the Prayer of Saint Francis, performed live on Ireland's The Late, Late Show.
Dressed uncharacteristically in long black wig, evening dress, purple feather cuffs and a full face of make-up (she'd just received a celebrity "makeover" to help promote a fundraiser for children and refugees who'd been victimized by the war in Yugoslavia), she impulsively pivots from the number she'd planned to perform to deliver the a cappella hymn instead. O'Connor's rendition, sung in a pure, lilting soprano, is both a personal and communal offering — a gift, a reconciliatory healing. She'd perform the same tune that week as a headliner at Peace '93, a Dublin rally to protest an IRA bombing in England that killed two children and wounded numerous others, and later for a 1997 Princess Diana memorial compilation album.
She was our freedom singer
"Make Me a Channel of Your Peace" serves as a reminder that Sinéad O'Connor was, at her core, what we might describe as a "freedom singer." I'm not suggesting that she had any direct connection to The Freedom Singers, the well-known Black civil rights musical group of the 1960s who were connected to. But in the spirit of '60s folk luminaries like and , and protest musicians she loved like and , O'Connor grew into her role as a healer whose greatest gift was to deliver mournful songs of lament and original tunes of personal and collective liberation. Many of her songs strove to soothe suffering and remedy trauma, to play as a moral soundtrack to human rights struggles, particularly those on 1994's and 1997's EP. The great tragedy is that for much of her career, O'Connor suffered privately and publicly: Just like musicians ranging from to , she was never fully able to unburden herself from trauma in the way her music may have helped others unburden themselves.
