O'McPub Band | Irish-American Duo

"Galway Girl" is the song Steve Earle, an American singer-songwriter wrote, an Irish accordion player made it travel, and an Irish singer took it to No. 1. It has been a pub staple ever since, and it is one of the most requested songs in our set.

Rest assured, though there are two famous songs with the same name, we do not perform the Ed Sheeran song. We do the one that belongs in Irish pubs, Earle's.

Written in Galway by an American

Steve Earle was living in Ireland in the late 1990s, spending months in Galway and playing with the traditional musicians he met there. “Galway Girl” came out of that stay. He recorded it with County Clare accordionist Sharon Shannon, backed by her band, and it appeared on his 2000 album Transcendental Blues and on Shannon's The Diamond Mountain Sessions the same year.

The song is semi-autobiographical: a traveler meets a girl with black hair and blue eyes, walks her through Galway — Salthill and the Long Walk are both named in the lyric — and loses her. The girl was real, her name is Joyce Redmond. However, the details or implied activities were made up. First off, Joyce is from Howth, County Dublin, and Earle only met her in Galway. Many people interpret from the second verse when she invites him up to her flat that he spends the night, though this has never been confirmed. Earle was also married at the time. The detail we like best, for obvious reasons: Redmond plays the bodhrán on Earle's recording. The girl the song is about is playing on the record, and has no idea the song is about her.

Five Weeks at No. 1: Ireland Takes It Over

The song spread the slow way first — sessions, pubs, and a turn in the 2007 film P.S. I Love You, where Gerard Butler's character sings it. Then Irish singer Mundy put it in his live show. His 2006 live album Live & Confusion, recorded at Vicar Street in Dublin, closed with “Galway Girl” as an encore, sung with Sharon Shannon — and that live version became a download hit, helped along by a Bulmers cider advertising campaign.

The studio single followed in April 2008: Mundy and Sharon Shannon, the same pairing. It reached No. 1 on the Irish Singles Chart and stayed there for five weeks. It was the biggest-selling download in Ireland in 2008 and the highest-selling single of the year overall, and it has since become the eighth highest-selling single in Irish chart history. An American's song about one night in Galway, outselling everything else in Ireland for a year. In June 2016, Galway staged a world-record street performance of the song, with Mundy and Shannon among the musicians who took part — the city quite literally singing its own song back.

The Other Galway Girl

In 2017, Ed Sheeran released his own “Galway Girl” on his album ÷ — a completely different song. Sheeran wrote it with the County Antrim traditional band Beoga, who play on the recording; the opening line came from Beoga's fiddle player, Niamh Dunne. The video was filmed in Galway and stars Saoirse Ronan. It was a worldwide hit, and it is the reason some of the younger people who request “Galway Girl” from us are picturing a different song than what we end up  playing.

Sheeran knew the Earle song existed and kept the title anyway. Both songs are about meeting a girl in Galway; beyond that they share nothing — different writers, different stories, different tunes. In an Irish pub, though, there is no contest about which one gets sung. It sits in our set the way it sits on this blog — next to songs like Brown Eyed Girl, another modern song by a single named writer that pubs have absorbed so completely people  assume it was always there.

Why It's in Our Set

For a duo of guitar and bodhrán, this song is close to a perfect fit — it was built on accordion and rhythm, and the bodhrán is on the original record, played by the woman the song is about. It is also simply one of the most reliable songs in Irish-American pub music: a chorus a whole room can sing, in the world of our Irish Pub Song post. Our Short of the song is one of the most-watched clips on our channel.

For the full record — Earle, Shannon, Mundy, and the chart run — Wikipedia's Galway Girl (Steve Earle song) lays it out, and Visit Galway's history of the song tells both Galway Girls' stories side by side.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Raglan Road" began as a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, written about Hilda Moriarty, a young medical student he met in Dublin in the 1940s. Kavanagh was 40, a published poet who called himself a peasant poet. Hilda was 22. He fell for her, she did not fall back, and he put her in a poem that Ireland has never stopped singing.

Written for Hilda Moriarty — Published Under Another Woman's Name

Hilda Moriarty was a medical student at University College Dublin whom Kavanagh encountered around Raglan Road in Ballsbridge, Dublin. In RTÉ's 1987 Kavanagh documentary Gentle Tiger, she told the story herself. She had teased the self-described "peasant poet" about his subjects — stony grey soil, cabbages, and turnips — and told him to write about something else. He answered that he would immortalize her in poetry, went away, and wrote it. She also said, plainly, that the age gap between them was a main reason the relationship failed. She later married Donogh O'Malley.

When the poem first hit the newsstands in the Irish Press on 3 October 1946, it bore the header "Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away" rather than "Raglan Road." Kavanagh chose "Miriam"—the name of his brother Peter's girlfriend—as a clever pseudonym to shelter Hilda from public attention. It wasn't until his 1964 Collected Poems reached print that the piece adopted its now-famous title, “On Raglan Road”.

This deliberate title switch reveals the intimate core of the narrative. Knowing from its opening lines that the romance was destined to falter, Kavanagh still penned this poignant tribute, publishing a parting message to his muse while cloaking her identity behind an assumed name.

The Air Kavanagh Chose: “Fáinne Geal an Lae”

The poem's iconic melody comes from an earlier air, "Fáinne Geal an Lae" ("The Dawning of the Day"). Originally an Irish-language song published by Edward Walsh in 1847, it was translated into English by Patrick Weston Joyce in 1873. Rather than being a choice made later by another performer, historical accounts show that Kavanagh always intended for his words to be set to this specific air.

Shortly after writing the piece, Kavanagh was remembered by Benedict Kiely test-singing it to the air, and a radio recording exists of the poet performing it to the melody himself. The union of poem and tune was already fully forged by the author before Luke Kelly ever sang it; the verse simply awaited its ideal interpreter.

The Bailey: Kavanagh Hands Luke Kelly the Song

The landmark encounter occurred in the 1960s at The Bailey pub in Dublin, where Patrick Kavanagh formally handed the poem over to Luke Kelly. Kelly consistently credited the poet with passing along the song, which Kelly went on to introduce to audiences across the globe. While persistent folklore claims Kavanagh demanded five pounds in exchange, that detail remains an unverified tale.

What is documented is the enduring legacy of their collaboration. The Dubliners released "Raglan Road" in 1971 as the B-side to "Scorn Not His Simplicity," and their definitive recording later served as the centerpiece for the 1986 compilation Luke's Legacy. By approaching the work as both elevated literature and a spirited pub ballad, Kelly fully realized the potential Kavanagh had envisioned back in 1946.

Versions Worth Hearing

Kelly's version remains the standard. Van Morrison recorded "Raglan Road" with The Chieftains — his take belongs with the rest of his Irish shelf here, Brown Eyed Girl and And It Stoned Me as well as his version of Star of the County Down. Sinéad O'Connor, Roger Daltrey, and Ed Sheeran have all sung it: a poem published under a borrowed name in a Dublin newspaper became a song any serious singer eventually has to try.

In our set it stands with the other Dublin literary songs: The Auld Triangle, Behan's Dublin, and Grace, Dublin, love, and loss in 1916 dress. Inside Irish Music's film, The Dubliners, Part 1 — Luke Kelly, is the best video companion to all three.

The fullest single account of the song's making — Hilda's own telling, Kiely's memory, The Bailey, and the air — is The Great Irish Songbook's Raglan Road, and NewsFour's Raglan Road: The Enchanted Way walks the Ballsbridge street itself for readers who want the place.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Haul Away Joe" is a sea shanty — a work song, sung by sailors to time the heavy pulling jobs aboard a sailing ship. Shanties were a mixed tradition: Irish, English, and Caribbean singing all fed into them on the Liverpool and Atlantic packet ships where these songs lived. Irishmen crewed those ships, Irish emigrants crossed on them out of Liverpool, and this is the music both groups worked and travelled to.

The song is built around one instruction repeated until the job is done: haul away. Everything else — the girls, the king of France, the shantyman's whole stock of verses — hangs off that chorus.

What Kind of Shanty Is Haul Away Joe? Collectors Disagree

While not everyone agrees, most believe Haul Away Joe was used as a foresheet shanty - a song for a short, heavy pull. Captain W.B. Whall, in 1913, describes it as a song for “sweating up,” hauling a rope taut. Shanties were working tools, not concert pieces, and a good song got used wherever the rhythm fit. Its neighbours in our set show the range: Drunken Sailor is the famous one, and Leave Her Johnny is the farewell sung when the voyage ended and the crew was paid off.

How the Song Worked: One Pull on “Joe”

This kind of shanty was used not to help the crew pull steadily but to pull all together on the signal word. In Haul Away Joe the signal word is “Joe.” It was often grunted more than sung. Between pulls, the shantyman sang the verses, and he kept inventing new ones until the first mate was satisfied the job was done. If twenty verses was how long the work took, twenty verses he sung. Luckily for you, we do three verses to finish our work.

You can hear that grunt land in our Short of the song. The full performance at the top of this post lets you hear the verses stack up the way they were meant to — one more reason the verse-by-verse breakdown below works.

Mouldy Lips, Dating, and King Louis

The verses jump the way a shantyman's mind jumps. In the O'McPub Band version we start with a warning from mommy dearest - get to kissing some girls or your lips will be mouldy. I'm sure this plea worked with all the ladies at shore.

For the second verse, the female examples are traditionally from Ireland and Bristol. Being a good Irish-American duo we stick with what we know and have the second girl be American — same joke, new port. Shanties collected verses the way ships collected crews, and verses naming the girls of particular ports were swapped in and out constantly.

Jolly Rovin' Tar is the shore-side cousin of this song — a sailor song, but not a work shanty — and Leaving of Liverpool is the emigrant's farewell from the same port these ships sailed from. Where do all these sailors end up? Fiddler's Green is their paradise.

The last verse we sing is about Louis, King of France. This verse uses the word “constitution” as a history lesson and double meaning. Louis had tried to pass a constitution to stave off a revolution, but his plan was spoiled when he lost his head to the guillotine. Not sure if shantymen ever used this verse for real but us history buffs find it amusing and so it stays in our version.

For the primary sources: Mainly Norfolk's page on the song (Roud 809) collects recordings and Hugill's notes in one place, and a shanty collection quoting Hugill, Terry, and Whall directly lets you read the collectors' own words. The National Museum of Ireland's Irish Emigration to America — The Journey puts Irish passengers on the same ships, out of the same ports, where this singing was the soundtrack of the work.

— hear us play it live (video above).

A Belfast Singer in a New York Studio, March 1967

"Brown Eyed Girl" is a Belfast song but is known as an American standard. Van Morrison was 21, raised on Hyndford Street in east Belfast, and had just come off the road with the Belfast band Them. In March 1967 he was in A&R Studios in New York, recording for producer Bert Berns' Bang Records label. The version of "Brown Eyed Girl" the world knows was the 22nd take. Released that June, it reached No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, and it has never really left the radio since.

That is the Irish story in this song, and it is a real one, even though there is nothing folk about the record: a young writer from east Belfast takes a tune with a calypso lift to New York and comes out with an American standard. Half the songs in this blog are about Irish people leaving. This one is about what one of them made after he left.

Why “Brown-Skinned Girl” Became “Brown Eyed Girl”

The song was written and first recorded as "Brown-Skinned Girl" — the title was a nod to the calypso feel of the music. By the time it was released, it was "Brown Eyed Girl," and Morrison's own account of how that happened is disarmingly unglamorous:

“That was just a mistake. After we'd recorded it, I looked at the tape box and didn't even notice that I'd changed the title.”

You will sometimes read that the original title was about an interracial couple, and that the change was made to soften the song for 1967 America. Treat that as unproven. Rhino — the label that now stewards Morrison's catalogue, and the source for most of the facts in this post — looked into it and calls that reading dubious: it traces to a claim in the Independent, and there is no direct quote from Morrison supporting it. What is documented is the accident on the tape box. What got changed for radio is a different part of the song entirely.

The Line Radio Wouldn't Play in 1967

The verifiable censorship story is in the lyric, not the title. Some stations in 1967 would not play a single with the line "making love in the green grass" in it, so they were sent a doctored version with an earlier line — "laughin' and a-runnin', hey hey" — pasted over the offending one. If you grew up hearing a slightly odd repeat in the third verse on oldies radio, that is why.

The other hard fact of the record: Morrison signed his Bang deal without legal advice, and he has said he never received royalties from "Brown Eyed Girl." It colours how he talks about the song to this day — asked about it by TIME in 2009, he said: "I've got about 300 songs that I think are better." Three hundred songs better than the one the whole world can sing.

The Belfast Place Hiding in the First Verse: Down in the Hollow

One detail ties the standard back to Belfast. The first verse opens "down in the Hollow" — and the Hollow is a real place, a green hollow in Bloomfield, east Belfast, about 200 metres from the house on Hyndford Street where Morrison grew up. The brown-eyed girl, the green grass, the days of skipping school and singing on the way home: the song's whole sunlit world is a Belfast childhood remembered from a New York studio. The standard is American. The memory in it is from about as far east in Belfast as you can get without falling in the lough.

We play it the way we play every song in this blog — and the other Van Morrison post here, And It Stoned Me, is its companion: the same Belfast writer, a few years further on, singing about a childhood fishing day instead. Two songs, one city, both carried all over the world.

For the full record — the session, the title, the radio edit, the royalties — the best single source is Rhino's own history: "Single Stories: Van Morrison records 'Brown Eyed Girl'".

— hear us play it live (video above).

"I'll Tell Me Ma" is a children's singing game from Belfast — also known as "The Belle of Belfast City" and "The Wind" — that grew up into a pub song. Children sing it in a ring, holding hands, with one child in the centre. Adults sing it in pubs, at speed, with the whole room on the chorus. It is the same song in both places, and that is exactly the point of it: this is how Irish tradition actually survives — not in books, but in schoolyards and community gathering places, passed from person to person.

The girl at the centre of the song is the belle of the city, and every child playing the game wants to be her, or wants to be chosen by her. The stakes are playground stakes, which to a child is everything.

Roud 2649: A Song Collected From Schoolyards Since the 1800s

The song has its papers. It is No. 2649 in the Roud Folk Song Index, the standard catalogue of English-language folk songs, and it was collected in various parts of Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth century and again in collections made just after 1900. "Collected" here mostly means written down from people singing it — and the people singing it were usually children, or adults remembering what children sang.

Many of the songs we perform were preserved by collectors, singers, and eventually record companies. This one was preserved by the playground, the least reliable and most durable archive there is. Our post on Mary Mack is about its natural partner — another children's favourite, a clapping game in Scotland, about courting and marriage sung by kids playing at the grown-up world. Rattlin' Bog is the other post here built on a cumulative song children learn by repetition.

How the Ring Game Works

The children form a ring and sing, with one child standing in the centre as the belle. The song describes her — handsome, the belle of the city — and runs through who she will and will not marry. Then comes the line the game turns on: "please won't you tell me who is she." At that moment the child in the centre names another child, and the named one takes the centre, and the game starts again.

The naming is the whole mechanism. It is how a child gets chosen in front of everybody, and how the song keeps itself going without an ending — there is always another belle.

Belle of Belfast City — or Dublin, or London

In Ulster, the chorus names Belfast. Elsewhere the same song names Dublin — The Dubliners and the Young Dubliners sing "Belle of Dublin City" — and other versions name the "Golden City" or London. This is not an error but the song working as intended: folk songs move from city to city and get made local, and possessiveness about the home version is part of the tradition.

We use Belfast because this is the version we heard most growing up. It is also nice because most of our Belfast songs show the city in a grimmer light. This one shows Belfast children singing and playing in a schoolyard and you'd never know if they were Protestant or Catholic.

The Archive Irish Children Wrote Themselves

In 1937–39, under a scheme run by the Irish Folklore Commission, schoolchildren across Ireland collected the lore of their own districts — including the games they played: skipping rhymes, counting-out rhymes, and ring games like this one. The result, the Schools' Collection, is now digitised at dúchas.ie. Songs like this one survive because children helped write their own play down.

One grown-up footnote: Van Morrison, a Belfast man, recorded "I'll Tell Me Ma" with The Chieftains on their 1988 album Irish Heartbeat, and it was released as a single — a rock singer going back to a schoolyard song from his own city.

To explore: UCD's Games I Play is the doorway into the Schools' Collection, with photographs of Dublin children playing in the 1930s; dúchas.ie lets you search the Collection's games from your own county; and Roger McGuinn's Folk Den page has the lyrics, chords, and the game in one place. Our own Short of the song has travelled further than any of our full videos of it.

— hear us play it live (video above) or hear it at an upcoming live show. We usually start a set with it!

Written in the H-Blocks: Bobby Sands' Poem of Exile

“Back Home in Derry” was written by Bobby Sands, an Irish republican prisoner in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh (the Maze Prison). Sands led the 1981 hunger strike, protesting the British government's refusal to grant political status to republican prisoners, and died on May 5, 1981, after 66 days without food.

The song he wrote is not about his own time, at least not on the surface. Its narrator is a rebel of an earlier Ireland, taken from his home in Derry and shipped in chains to Australia, looking back at the town he will never see again. But nobody who knows where the words were written hears it as only history. A man in a cell in 1980, writing as a transported rebel of 1803, was writing his own situation into the long Irish story of prison and exile. That is the whole song in one move: the cell and the convict ship are the same place, 178 years apart.

1803 Robert Emmet's Rebels Bound for Botany Bay

The narrator sails in the aftermath of the rising of 1803, Robert Emmet's short, doomed rebellion in Dublin. Emmet's execution is in the song, and the men in the hold with the narrator are his rebels, “sixty rebels now bound for Botany Bay.”

Transportation was the British government's answer to rebellion: instead of a grave in Ireland that people could gather at, a convict ship and a one-way journey to the far side of the world. Between 1788 and 1868, roughly 162,000 convicts were transported to Australia, and about a quarter of them were Irish. Sands' sixty rebels were one shipload in a traffic that ran for eighty years — and for the men on it, “home” became a word for somewhere you described to your children but never saw again. Our post on Black Velvet Band tells the same journey from  a different angle: a Belfast girl, a stolen watch, and Van Diemen's Land.

How Christy Moore Heard It in Derry and Put It on Ride On (1984)

Moore was playing in Derry and staying with the Barrett family on Chamberlain Street when a young man, just home from the H-Blocks, sang him the verses and wrote them out for him. The next night, in Bellaghy, Colm Scullion — who had shared a cell with Sands on the blanket protest — sang him another Sands song, “McIlhatton.” Moore put “Back Home in Derry” on his album Ride On (1984), produced by Dónal Lunny, in a version shorter than Sands' original poem. That record is how a lyric written in a prison cell reached the world: carried out in memory and on paper, sung in two houses, and recorded within three years of its author's death.

Moore's page for the song has the full lyric and his account in his own words — it is the best thing on the internet about this song, and it is linked below.

Why a Canadian Shipwreck Song Carries It

If the tune sounds familiar, it should. Moore set Sands' words to the air of Gordon Lightfoot's “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” — Moore himself suspects the air “has earlier origins,” but Lightfoot's shipwreck ballad is the shape everyone knows. We have a whole post on The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and the pairing is not an  accident of convenience: a song about men lost at sea in 1975 carries a song about men shipped over the sea in 1803, and both are about the ones who never came home.

This is one of a small cluster of prison songs in our set. Men Behind the Wire is the internment song of a decade earlier, The Auld Triangle is Mountjoy's, and Grace ends in Kilmainham. Sands knew exactly which shelf of Irish  song he was writing for.

Want to dig deeper? Christy Moore's own page — lyric and the story of hearing it — is the primary source. Kilmainham Gaol Museum's Transportation page lays out the system the song's narrator was shipped through. On video, Inside Irish Music tells the story behind “Back Home in Derry” in a Short, and Davy Holden's interviews recorded after Sands' death — republican and unionist voices both — have been watched more than 200,000 times.

— hear us play it live (video above).

What Was an American Wake?

An American wake was a goodbye held the night before an emigrant left Ireland for America — a party that was also, deliberately, a funeral. The custom is documented from at least 1830 and was strongest in the west of Ireland. In Irish-speaking Mayo it had another name: the “feast of departure.”

They became more frequent during the Great Famine of the 1840s, when families had to make a brutal choice: who would be sent to America in hope of a better life, and who would stay behind to face the hardship. Emigration did not end with the Famine — it ran on for another century — and the wake went with it, because for most of that time the facts never changed. The person leaving would probably never see Ireland again. The people at the wake would probably never see them again. So they said goodbye properly, the night before.

On stage, Ryan-Allen usually puts it this way: “the Great Famine — or genocide, depending on your persuasion.” That argument is a real one, and it deserves more than a passing line. We’ll take it up properly when we get to Fields of Athenry, which is a Famine song through and through. This post is about the night before the boat.

Why a Wake for Someone Still Alive?

Because emigration was treated as the equivalent of a death — a permanent breaking of ties. The American wake borrowed its shape straight from the traditional wake for the dead: the kin and neighbours gathered in the house, there was food and drink, and grief and gaiety sat in the same room. Nobody pretended it was only a party, and nobody let it be only a mourning. Both things were true, and the custom made room for both.

The Night Itself: Keening, Music and the Morning Convoy

In the week before leaving, the emigrant visited every house in the community to say goodbye in person. Then came the wake itself, which ran from evening into the early morning.

There was keening — caoine, the old Irish lament — for someone who was still standing in the room. There was advice from the older people. There were messages to carry to relatives who had already made the crossing and were waiting in America. And as times improved a little, there was food, drink, dancing and music — sometimes paid for with money sent from America along with the ticket, by the family members who had gone before.

In the morning, a “convoy” of family and neighbours walked the emigrant to the crossroads or the train station. That was the last anybody saw of them.

The crossing itself gave the custom its weight. Crossings varied, but the National Museum of Ireland documents one Mayo ship, the Elizabeth and Sarah in 1847: 276 passengers sharing 32 berths, an eight-week voyage, and 42 of them dead before America. Anybody holding a wake in 1847 knew those odds. That is why the goodbye was a funeral — some of the people in that room were, in fact, saying goodbye forever, and everyone knew it.

The Elders' “American Wake” (2004)

The song is by The Elders, a Celtic rock band from Kansas City, and it gives the album its name — American Wake (2004), their third record. There’s one detail we love about that: The Elders are fronted by Ian Byrne, a native of County Wicklow. An emigrant, singing the emigrant’s goodbye ritual, from the far side of the Atlantic. The song is the diaspora looking back at the night that started it.

We play it because that night is where a huge part of the Irish-American story begins. If you want the rest of the journey, we’ve written about Thousands Are Sailing and Leaving of Liverpool. For the wake tradition carried across the ocean, see our post on Body of an American — a Philadelphia send-off for a boxer. And for what the emigrants were leaving for, All of the Hard Days Are Gone.

Want to dig deeper? The custom is laid out at Encyclopedia.com, “American Wakes”, and the National Museum of Ireland tells the story of the crossing itself. Inside Irish Music's video what Ireland sounded like before the Great Famine is a good picture of the world this custom grew in.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Kiss Me I'm Irish" is a diaspora anthem: a song that maps Ireland and Irish America in the same breath and argues that the songs and stories are what keep the connection alive. It was written by Gaelic Storm, a band formed in a California pub — which means the song about Irish identity abroad was itself made by the Irish abroad.

The song appears on Gaelic Storm's 2006 album Bring Yer Wellies, written by Twigger, Murphy, Wehmeyer, and Reid. We close sets with it because it does in four minutes what this whole blog tries to do — and because its chorus is a line a whole room can shout back.

Written by a Band the Diaspora Produced

Gaelic Storm formed in 1997 in Santa Monica, California, out of local pub sessions. Their first major exposure came the same year, playing the steerage band in the film Titanic — an Irish band formed in America, playing emigrants on screen, in the most famous emigration scene in cinema.

That origin matters for this song. "Kiss Me I'm Irish" is not a song Ireland wrote about its emigrants. It is a song the diaspora wrote about itself, from inside an American pub scene, by musicians whose living came from playing Irish music to Irish-American crowds. The quicker take is in our Kiss Me I'm Irish Short.

Cork, Donegal, Cleveland, DC: The Song's Map

The lyric moves between Irish counties and American cities as if they were stops on the same road: Cork and Donegal in one breath, Cleveland and DC in another. That geography is the point. For the diaspora, those places really are one map — the town you came from and the city your grandchildren were born in, held together by family, memory, and music.

It is the cheerful version of the map drawn in Thousands Are Sailing, where the leaving is the wound. Here the leaving is a fact, and the song is about what got carried: "I am my island, my island is me." Identity in this song is not a place you stand on. It is a thing you take with you.

The pub is where that carrying happens, which is the subject of our Irish Pub Song post — the pub as the room where diaspora culture is kept, not just where drinks are served.

"Old Songs and Old Stories Keep Us Alive"

The song plays with the stereotype before it answers it. The singer is "seldom sober," his days "end in Y," and the whole thing could sit comfortably next to Whiskey in the Jar and Wild Rover on the drinking shelf of the tradition — two songs this one name-checks in spirit.

Then the lyric turns: "Old songs and old stories, they keep us alive." That is the song's real claim. What survives the crossing is not the accent or the address. It is the repertoire — the tunes, the tales, the choruses everybody in the room already knows. A band packing up at the end of the night while the crowd sings this one back is the argument being proved in real time.

For the album and the song's writing credits, see Wikipedia, "Bring Yer Wellies"; for the band's Santa Monica pub origins and the Titanic steerage-band story, see Wikipedia, "Gaelic Storm".

— hear us play it live (video above).

"The Auld Triangle" is a prison song from Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, sung along the Royal Canal. It is usually credited to Brendan Behan, because it opens his 1954 play The Quare Fellow. The best-documented account says Behan did not write it: the writer was Dick Shannon, a Dublin friend of Behan's, and Behan himself said so, on the record, more than once.

Behan first performed the song publicly in 1952, two years before the play, on RTÉ radio's The Ballad Maker's Saturday Night. The song's world is the prison day — the triangle struck to mark waking, meals, and lockdown, and the canal outside the walls carrying on without the men inside.

Mountjoy Prison and The Quare Fellow (1954)

The Quare Fellow is set in Mountjoy on the night before an execution — "quare fellow" is prison slang for the condemned man. The song hangs over the play the way the triangle hangs over the prison day: it is the sound of the routine that continues whatever is happening in the cells.

Mountjoy is one of the two Dublin prisons that run through this repertoire. The other is Kilmainham, where Joseph Plunkett married Grace hours before his execution in 1916. A generation separates the two songs. The buildings, and the system behind them, are the same subject.

Dick Shannon: The Man Behan Said Wrote It

Behan's biographer Michael O'Sullivan records that Mícheál Ó hAodha, who produced the RTÉ programme on which Behan first performed the song in 1952, said Behan never claimed authorship and asked him to send the copyright to Dick Shannon.

Introducing his own 1960 recording, Behan said it plainly: "This song was written by a person who will never hear it recorded, because he's not in possession of a gramophone. He's … pretty much of a tramp." Shannon's family — his nephew Deasún ÓSeanáin and his grandson Tom Neary — have made the case publicly: Shannon wrote it, he was an articulate man from the Liberties, and he never received a penny in royalties for it.

Why Dominic Behan's Name Is on It Too

Dominic Behan, Brendan's younger brother, made the first commercial recording of the song, on his 1958 Topic album Irish Songs. The liner notes describe it as "a song of Mountjoy Prison … made popular in the play 'The Quare Fella'" — without claiming he wrote it. Even so, some secondary sources credit Dominic as the writer, which is how his name became attached to it.

Dominic was a major songwriter in his own right — Come Out Ye Black and Tans is unquestionably his — and the Behan family thread runs through this set in both directions: in Streams of Whiskey, Shane MacGowan dreams of meeting Brendan and taking his advice. The authorship of "The Auld Triangle" stays disputed in print. The documented account — Behan's own words, his producer's account, and Shannon's family — points to Dick Shannon.

The Triangle Still Hangs in Mountjoy

The triangle in the song is real equipment, not a symbol invented for the lyric: a large metal triangle beaten to mark the stages of the prison day. It still hangs in Mountjoy at the point where the wings meet, its hammer mounted beside it, and it is no longer used.

The song is still working in Dublin, too. It is now sung as a terrace chant by supporters of Bohemians FC, whose ground stands near the prison — a prison song carried out of the play, onto the records, and into a football crowd a short walk from where it is set. Prison writing in this repertoire did not end with Behan: Men Behind the Wire is the internment song of a later generation, written out of the same experience of men locked up and time marked for them.

Wikipedia's article on the song gives the fullest available account of the Shannon claim, the 1952 first performance, and the recording history, and links to the Mudcat Café discussion where Shannon's family make their case in their own words.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"The Rattlin' Bog" is a cumulative song — the kind that builds a list and makes the singers carry all of it, every verse, in order, at speed. It starts with a bog, puts a tree in the bog, a branch on the tree, and keeps going down through smaller and smaller things until the list ends at a flea on a feather on a bird in a nest on an egg in the tree in the bog. Miss one item and the whole room knows.

There is no author to credit and no single correct set of words, and that is not a gap in the record. It is the record. This is a song that exists because thousands of singers kept it going, each adding their own version to the pile. This post pins down what is actually known about it — its index number, its other names, and how it is performed — and answers the question in its first word: what "rattlin'" means.

Roud 129: One Song, 180 Versions, No Correct Lyrics

In the Roud Folk Song Index, the great catalogue of traditional songs in English, "The Rattlin' Bog" is No. 129. Some 180 versions of it have been collected from oral tradition. It travels under other titles too, including "The Everlasting Circle" and "The Green Grass Grew All Around," and it has analogues — songs built the same cumulative way — in French, Italian, German, and Dutch. Its earliest traced form appears as "March to the Battlefield" in Riley's Flute Melodies.

Read those facts together and the song's nature is clear. A written song has an original. This one has a family: 180 collected versions, in several countries and languages, sharing a structure and a chorus and differing in the details. The list of things in the bog varies from singer to singer and place to place. Every version that keeps the build and the chorus is a real version.

That family history is also the song's route into Irish sets and American summers. It has spent decades as a U.S. summer-camp marching song, sung by American kids who mostly have no idea they are singing a song Irish pub crowds claim as their own — and both claims are true, which is what an oral tradition means.

Why It Speeds Up: The Song as a Contest

The performance is the point of the song. The tempo typically rises verse by verse, so the list that was comfortable at the start becomes a genuine test by the end. Often one singer leads the "Now on that…" lines that introduce each new item, while the whole group joins in for the cumulative list and the chorus. The leader's job is to keep the order straight. The room's job is to keep up.

That makes the song a contest disguised as a chorus. The challenge is built in: memory, breath, and speed, all at once, in public. Singers drop items, rooms collapse laughing, and the failure is part of the entertainment rather than an interruption of it. It is one of the few songs in our set where the band is visibly working — guitar and bodhrán holding the tempo steady while the list gets longer and faster and the margin for error gets thinner.

The other songs in our set built on the room joining in explain the same mechanic from different sides. I'll Tell Me Ma survives as a children's ring game, a song kept by being played. Irish Pub Song is about participation as the pub's whole purpose. And Kiss Me I'm Irish is our other closer built on the whole room singing whether they planned to or not.

What "Rattlin'" Actually Means

The first word is the one people misread. "Rattlin'" does not describe a sound. In older Irish-English slang, "rattlin'" means excellent, splendid, lively — a rattlin' bog is a splendid bog. The title is a compliment, not a noise report.

It is a fitting name for the song's own career. A splendid bog, a rare old tree, and a list that has been sung in camps, pubs, kitchens, and sessions, in at least five languages' worth of versions, by people who learned it from other people and passed it on the same way. No author, no original, no finished text — just the build, the chorus, the rising speed, and the next singer stepping up to try the list.

For how the song lives now in American group singing, the USC Digital Folklore Archives' Rattlin' Bog page documents it from fieldwork, and the song's Roud 129 version family is laid out at Wikipedia, "The Rattlin' Bog".

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Green Fields of France" — Eric Bogle's original title for it was "No Man's Land" — was written in 1976 by Bogle, a Scottish-born singer who had emigrated to Australia. He wrote it after walking the military cemeteries of Flanders, where the graves run in long rows. The song sits the singer down beside one grave: Willie McBride, a soldier who died in 1916 at the age of nineteen.

It is not a song about a battle. One man talks to one dead man and asks him questions he cannot answer. That is why the song has outlasted nearly every other song written about that war.

Who Was Willie McBride? The Real Men Behind the Name

Bogle answered this question himself: he had no one soldier in mind. He chose the name "McBride" partly because it rhymed with "graveside," and partly on purpose — an Irish name, chosen as a reminder of Irish sacrifice at a time when anti-Irish feeling in Britain ran strong. He has also said that every soldier in the cemetery is a Willie McBride.

People have gone looking. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission lists eight men named William McBride and six more listed as "W. McBride" who died in France and Belgium — and none of them matches the song exactly, because the song says nineteen in 1916. The closest are two men buried at Authuille Military Cemetery on the Somme, both in Irish regiments. One is Private William McBride of the 9th Battalion, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, from County Armagh, who died on 22 April 1916 — but he was twenty-one, not nineteen. The second "W." McBride at Authuille has no age recorded. An Armagh historian and the McBride family argue the Armagh man is the one whose grave Bogle sat beside. That is their researched claim, not a settled fact — and the honest answer is that the grave, if there was one grave, held a real young man whose name happened to fit a rhyme.

Ireland's Forgotten First World War Soldiers

The name matters because of what Ireland did with its First World War dead afterward. Roughly 210,000 Irishmen served in the war, and perhaps 35,000 were killed — the counts differ depending on who is counted, and the Irish War Memorial Records of 1923 put the total dead at 49,400, a figure that includes men in Irish regiments born outside Ireland. Every one of them was a volunteer — Ireland was exempt from conscription.

After independence, the new Irish state largely forgot these men, because they had worn British uniforms. For decades their service went uncommemorated. That long official silence, and Ireland's slow recovery of these soldiers' memory, is the Irish story inside this song. A different post on this blog, Four Green Fields, uses "green fields" for Tommy Makem's Ireland-as-mother; Bogle's green fields are French cemeteries, and the two songs get mixed up often enough to separate them.

What the Song Asks

The verses are questions. Did the drums beat slowly at the funeral? Did the pipes play? And then the question the whole song turns on: did the men who sent him, and the men who followed him into the next war, learn anything? Bogle's generation watched another war being prepared while the first one's survivors were still alive, and the anger is quiet because it does not need to be loud.

It belongs on a short shelf of songs that keep named dead men from being forgotten. Our post on The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is about the same job done for twenty-nine sailors on Lake Superior. And the generation Willie McBride belonged to had two roads out of poverty: emigration and enlistment. Thousands Are Sailing sings about the ones who took the boat.

From Irish No. 1 to Dropkick Murphys

The Fureys & Davey Arthur took the song to No. 1 in Ireland from their 1979 album The Green Fields of France, and that is largely how it became Ireland's song. In 2005 Irish-American band Dropkick Murphys recorded it, carrying it back across the Atlantic. In the United States it is heard in November, around Veterans Day — November 11 was Armistice Day, marking the end of the First World War, before it was renamed Veterans Day in 1954 and widened to honour all who served.

The Irish Family Detective's research on Willie McBride is the best single read on the identity question. Dublin's Irish National War Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge is a place readers can visit, and the Irish War Memorial Records on Google Arts & Culture lets you search for a family name. Inside Irish Music's Truth Behind Ireland's Most Famous Anti-War Song is worth watching, and History Ireland's Armistice Day essay covers the forgetting and the remembering.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"What shall we do with a drunken sailor?" is the most famous question in sea music, and nobody has ever answered it sensibly. "Drunken Sailor" is a work song — a shanty — sung to time hard labour aboard ship, and it has been sung that way since at least the 1830s.

It is not an Irish song, and this post won't pretend otherwise. But the tune underneath it leads a double life: the same tune family turns up in Ireland as Óró sé do bheatha abhaile, a song the Irish Volunteers marched to during the Easter Rising. A shanty for hauling ropes and a rebel marching song, built on the same bones — that is a real Irish-music story, and it is why this song sits comfortably in our set.

A Work Song First: Hauling Ropes on an 1839 Whaling Ship

The earliest clear sighting of the shanty in print comes from an account of an 1839 whaling voyage out of New London, Connecticut, sung by a long line of men hauling together. It is No. 322 in the Roud Folk Song Index, and it was sung aboard ship from at least the 1830s onward.

It belongs to a particular class of shanty: a "stamp-and-go" or walkaway shanty, sung at a marching pace while the crew tacked the ship or hauled on a line as they walked. That job explains the song's shape. The chorus — "Way, hey, and up she rises" — never stops moving, because the men singing it never stopped moving. The verses had to be endless, because the work was.

Shanties were tools before they were entertainment. The song kept a crew pulling together at the same moment, which on a sailing ship was the difference between work done and men hurt. Our post on Haul Away Joe covers the same floating workplace from another watch, and Leave Her Johnny is the shanty sung at the end of a voyage, when the ship was finally paid off.

The Irish Tune Underneath: Óró Sé Do Bheatha 'Bhaile

The melody of "Drunken Sailor" closely resembles the Irish air Óró sé do bheatha abhaile — "Óró, you are welcome home." The honest wording is that the two belong to the same tune family: reference works describe a close resemblance rather than a proven borrowing, and nobody can show the exact moment one became the other. Sailors and soldiers carried tunes everywhere in those centuries, and tunes changed flags the way the men carrying them did.

The Irish song has its own long history. Its older Jacobite-era versions welcomed Bonnie Prince Charlie home; the lyric tradition also carries Grace O'Malley, the pirate queen of Connacht. In the early 1900s, Pádraig Pearse wrote new verses for it, and the Irish Volunteers sang it during the Easter Rising and used it as a fast march in the War of Independence.

So the same tune family did duty in both worlds at once: sailors of every nation hauling ropes to it at sea, and Irish Volunteers marching to it on land. Irishmen crewed ships out of every Atlantic port, and tunes moved between the forecastle and the rebel column because the same men, in different years, stood in both.

Fiddler's Green is the third corner of our sea songs: the heaven sailors imagined for themselves. The drunken sailor's morning, by contrast, is very much earthly, and the song is about to deal with him.

Why Every Verse Asks the Same Question — and Answers It Worse Each Time

The verses are a list of punishments, and the list is the joke. Put him in a longboat till he's sober. Put him in the scuppers with a hosepipe on him. Shave his belly with a rusty razor. Each verse answers the question worse than the verse before.

That structure is practical as well as funny. A shanty had to last as long as the job lasted, so it was built to be extended by anyone in the crew — you only needed one new cruelty per verse, and the chorus carried you while you thought of it. It is the same building method as the pub songs in our set: a chorus a whole room can hold, and verses anyone can add to.

And the question was never really a question. Every sailor singing it knew the drunken sailor would be back on duty soon enough. The song laughs at him because the whole crew had been him.

Want to dig deeper? Wikipedia's Drunken Sailor article covers the 1839 sighting and the shanty's working life, and its article on Óró sé do bheatha abhaile traces the tune's other career — Jacobite welcome, Grace O'Malley, Pearse's verses and the Volunteers.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"The Rare Old Mountain Dew" is a song in praise of poitín — pronounced "pot-cheen" — the clear Irish spirit made for centuries in small stills, usually in out-of-the-way places, by men who did not advertise the work. Poitín is the "mountain dew" of the title. The song sings about a neat little still at the foot of a hill, about keeping it hidden, and about giving the law the slip, and it sings about all of it with open affection. This is the one song in our whiskey set that is about the drink itself rather than a drinker, which makes it the right place to answer the question people actually search: what is poitín?

Poitín was ordinary Irish country distilling before it was a crime. Unlicensed distilling was banned in 1661, and from then on the still at the foot of the hill was illegal by definition. For more than three centuries the makers worked around excise officers, police, and informers, and the drink became a byword for Irish refusal to be regulated out of a tradition.

Poitín: Banned in 1661, Legal Again in 1997

The legal story has a clean timeline. Unlicensed distilling was banned in 1661. Licensed poitín production was legalized in 1997. In 2008, Irish Poitín received Protected Geographical Indication status from the European Union — the same kind of protection given to regional products across Europe, meaning the name itself is now guarded by law. The outlaw drink is a protected Irish product, made openly by licensed distillers.

Dublin even has a poitín cocktail bar named for the turning point: Bar 1661, named for the year of the ban.

The song's drinkers never waited for any of that. Drinkers will tell you, as a legend, that St. Patrick himself resorted to poitín when altar wine ran out, and credited it with near-miraculous properties. The song takes the same line about the drink's powers, and it is best read the same way: as what poitín drinkers say about poitín, told with a wink.

Written for the Stage in 1882 by Edward Harrigan of Irish New York

Here is the turn in the story: the definitive song about Ireland's illegal stills was written for the New York stage. "The Rare Old Mountain Dew" was written by Edward Harrigan, with music by David Braham, for the 1882 play The Blackbird. Its tune is older than the words — the air is "The Girl I Left Behind Me," also known as Brighton Camp. The earliest recording of the song was made by John Griffin in New York in 1927.

Harrigan is a major figure in the Irish-American story. With his partner Tony Hart, he built a run of New York musical theatre out of Irish immigrant life — the Smithsonian describes his plays as depicting how Irish immigrant characters interacted with the city around them. So the song that sounds like it was collected at a Connemara fireside was written by Irish-America, for an audience of Irish immigrants and their children, about the drink their parents' generation had made back home. It is a comic boast by a professional entertainer who knew his audience would recognize the still, the hills, and the revenue men.

Gaugers, Gougers, and Giving Them the Slip

One word in the song comes in two forms. Joe Heaney, the great Connemara singer, sang a version called "The Real Old Mountain Dew," with the line "No gaugers call from Donegal, Sligo or Leitrim too." The Joe Heaney Archive glosses gaugers plainly: "Revenue men. They weren't popular." Against the gaugers, "we'll give them the slip" is a promise aimed at the law. Other versions sing "gougers," which Irish Music Daily glosses as hard-drinking companions — the lads themselves. Both readings are in the record, and the song carries either one.

Heaney's version also gives the song its map: Galway Bay, Donegal, Sligo, and Leitrim — the west and northwest, poitín country, where the stills were hidden and the gaugers were given the slip for generations.

In our set, this post is the hub the other whiskey songs point to. Moonshiner is the same illicit still told from America. Nancy Whiskey, Streams of Whiskey, and Whiskey You're the Devil are the drinkers' side of the shelf, and Whiskey in the Jar is where whiskey meets the law in a different key. In Fairytale of New York, the Pogues name-check this very song — a good measure of where it sits in the Irish songbook.

For the song sung by a master, the Joe Heaney Archive has Heaney performing it in 1978 with the archive's own notes on gaugers and poteen, and Chilled Magazine's Story of Poitín walks the 1661-to-1997-to-GI timeline in full.

— hear us play it live (video above).

On November 10, 1975, the freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald went down in a storm on Lake Superior with all 29 of her crew. No one survived, and to this day nobody knows for certain what sank her. Outside the Great Lakes, most of the world knows her name for one reason: Gordon Lightfoot wrote a song about her within the year.

An honest word about why this song is on an Irish band's blog: the connection is the tradition, not the wreck. Lightfoot was Canadian and the crew were Great Lakes men. What the song shares with the Irish music on this blog is its job — a long narrative ballad that names working men and refuses to let them be forgotten. That is the same work done by Fiddler's Green and Leave Her Johnny, and Irish-American audiences in Great Lakes and pub country have taken those 29 names personally for fifty years.

November 10, 1975: What Happened to the Edmund Fitzgerald

The Fitzgerald was the largest ship on the Lakes when she was launched, loaded with iron ore and working the run across Superior into the teeth of a November storm — the season the song calls the gales of November. The lyrics follow the final hours closely: the cargo, the relative safety of the Canadian shore route, the messages passing between ships as the weather closed in. Then, on the evening of November 10, she was gone — lost with all hands, in a sinking that has been investigated, argued over, and never fully explained.

Without the song, the wreck would likely have remained what it first was: a regional tragedy, enormous to the families and the Lakes ports, and unknown almost everywhere else. Lightfoot released the song in August 1976, less than a year after the sinking, and it carried the crew's story around the world.

How Lightfoot Wrote It (Newsweek, a Sea-Shanty Tune, and a Changed Line)

Lightfoot built the song from a magazine article. The Newsweek piece was headlined "The Cruelest Month," and it opened with the Chippewa legend of Gitche Gumee, the shining Big-Sea-Water — which is where the song's first verse comes from. The long, rolling tune underneath it is shaped like a sea shanty, built to carry a story verse after verse.

He also fact-checked himself, which fits how this blog tries to tell these stories. Early versions of the song suggested a main hatchway had caved in. Later reporting found no proof of that, and Lightfoot changed the line in live performance rather than lay blame where it did not belong. The songwriter corrected his own song when the evidence moved.

Remembering the Crew

In Detroit, when the news came in, the bell of the Mariners' Church was rung 29 times by the Reverend Richard Ingalls — once for each man. The song ends at that bell, and the bell is still the centre of how the crew is remembered. Since Lightfoot's death in 2023, the church has rung a 30th toll: for Lightfoot himself, and for all sailors lost on the Lakes.

The ship's own bell — 200 pounds of bronze — was recovered from the wreck on July 4, 1995, and is on display at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point, placed there as a memorial to the crew at the families' request. The museum holds a memorial ceremony every November 10.

That work of naming and remembering is why this post sits comfortably next to Green Fields of France: one ballad names a single soldier in a war grave, the other names a crew of 29, and both exist so the dead are not just a number.

The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum's Edmund Fitzgerald page covers the bell, the annual ceremony, and the expeditions to the wreck, and Smithsonian Magazine's 50th-anniversary account tells the full story of the final voyage and the mystery after it.

— hear us play it live (video above).

A highwayman robs Captain Farrell on a mountain road in Cork or Kerry, counts the money, and takes it home to Jenny. Jenny empties his pistols, fills them with water, and sends for the captain. He wakes up in prison, cursing the woman he loved. It is probably the best-known Irish song in the world — and it is sung, start to finish, from the robber's side.

That choice of side is the song's real subject. The law is not the hero of "Whiskey in the Jar." The man it arrests is.

Who Was the Rapparee? (And Why Ireland Rooted for Him)

The narrator is a rapparee — one of the Irish highwaymen who held up travellers on the mountain roads. Alan Lomax explained the feeling behind the song in The Folk Songs of North America: in Ireland and Scotland, highwaymen who "robbed English landlords… were regarded as national patriots. Such feelings inspired this rollicking ballad."

That is the key to the song. A man who robbed an English official or a landlord was not remembered in his own community as a common criminal. He was remembered as one of theirs, getting something back. So the audience does not hear a crime story. It hears a local man outwitting Captain Farrell — and when Jenny betrays him, the betrayal stings precisely because the crowd was rooting for the robber.

Patrick Fleming, 1650: The Broadside Behind the Song

The song's exact origins are unknown, but several of its lines and much of its plot resemble a contemporary broadside, "Patrick Fleming" — also printed as "Patrick Flemmen He Was a Valiant Soldier" — about an Irish highwayman who was executed in 1650.

That is a resemblance, not an identification: nobody can prove Fleming's broadside is this song, or that its robber is Captain Farrell's man. What it shows is that the story shape — the charming highwayman, the robbery, the gallows waiting — was already being printed and sold in the street while real rapparees were still working the roads. Inside Irish Music traces this line in The Real Story Behind Whiskey in the Jar, asking whether Fleming was a ruthless outlaw or an Irish Robin Hood.

What Jenny Did to His Pistols

Tell the betrayal properly, because the detail is what makes it cold. Jenny does not just inform on him. She draws the charges from his pistols and fills them with water — she disarms him first, so that when Captain Farrell comes, the man who was never taken rises from his bed with two useless guns. Then she sends for the captain. The last verse is sung from a cell because of the order she did those things in.

The version the modern world sings has a paper trail. Colm Ó Lochlainn printed it in Irish Street Ballads in 1939. He learned it from his mother, who learned it in Limerick in 1870 from a man called Buckley, from Cork — and that printed version is virtually identical to the one the 1960s folk bands sang. The song also crossed the Atlantic: American versions relocate it to the Ozarks and Appalachians, possibly due to Irish settlement in those places.

It sits on a shelf of songs about men undone and taken: Black Velvet Band, where the undoing ends in transportation to Van Diemen's Land, and our other whiskey songs — Whiskey You're the Devil and Wild Rover, the returning man with gold from roving instead of robbery.

For the full text, broadside history, and discography, Mainly Norfolk's Whiskey in the Jar page is the deepest single source. Davy Holden's Ireland's Most Notorious Highwayman covers the wider world of the Irish highwaymen these songs came from.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Killeagh" is a song about a village of about 900 people in East Cork, written for a junior hurling team, that became the biggest song in Ireland in 2025. It was written in about 20 minutes. Songs written for a place — for a club, a team, a final — are one of the oldest traditions in Irish music, and this is that tradition happening now, with streaming numbers.

The band behind it is Kingfishr. The song first appeared in December 2024 as the B-side of "Bet On Beauty." Its road to No. 1 started on a hurling pitch.

Written in 20 Minutes for a Junior Hurling Final

Kingfishr's bassist, Eoin "Fitz" Fitzgibbon, comes from Killeagh and played for the village's GAA club for 20 years. In 2024 the Killeagh junior hurlers reached the East Cork final for the first time since 2001. Fitz's former coach, Phillip O'Neill, asked him to write a song if the juniors made the final — a final Fitz thought unlikely, given the 23-year wait.

Fitz wrote it in about 20 minutes. The song names the place plainly: the village, and Glenbower Woods above it. Then came the part no record company could have planned — the first live performance of "Killeagh" was given by the junior hurlers themselves. They sang it, and then they went out and won the final. For readers new to the sport, Davy Holden's video on the 3,000-year-old game of hurling explains what a junior final means to a parish like Killeagh. You can also catch the short version in our Killeagh Short.

From an East Cork Final to No. 1 in Ireland

The song kept climbing through the first half of 2025 and peaked at No. 1 on the Irish Singles Chart on 2 May 2025. It was already four-times platinum in Ireland by May 2025 and had almost reached five-times platinum by June 2026. It kept returning to the top of the chart, spending 17 weeks at No. 1 in all.

IRMA, the Irish Recorded Music Association, named "Killeagh" the most-streamed song in Ireland in 2025. A song about one East Cork village, written for a junior hurling team, out-streamed everything else in the country for a year.

A Modern Addition to the Irish Folk Canon

Songs like this are not new in Ireland — what is new is the scale. Parishes and clubs have always had their songs: written for a final, sung in the pub after, carrying the names of local places and local people. Our post on Four Green Fields covers an earlier generation's anthem of place and colours, and Raglan Road is built on one Dublin street holding a whole life. "Killeagh" works the same way, and emigrants streaming a song about a village of 900 people because it sounds like home are part of the same story.

Two academics at the University of Limerick, Dr Sandra Joyce and Dr Róisín Ní Ghallóglaigh, have said the song's phrasing is typical of Irish traditional music and called it "a modern addition to the Irish folk canon." Like Fisherman's Blues, it is a modern Irish song that walked into the folk repertoire and stayed.

The full chart run, background, and the University of Limerick assessment are laid out at Wikipedia, "Killeagh (song)", and IMRO, the Irish Music Rights Organisation, covered the song's rise and Fitz's 20 years playing for Killeagh GAA.

— hear us play it live (video above).

Dominic Behan wrote "Come Out Ye Black and Tans" in the early 1960s, a generation after the events it argues about. It is one of the best-known Irish rebel songs ever written — and most people who sing the chorus have never looked at who it is actually aimed at. It is not, for the most part, aimed at the Black and Tans at all.

Behan knew this world from inside his own house. He was the son of Stephen Behan, an IRA veteran, and the younger brother of Brendan Behan. The song is family memory set to music: a son writing down his father's Dublin, in his father's voice.

Who Were the Black and Tans? Ireland, 1920–21

The Black and Tans were reinforcements sent to Ireland in 1920–21, during the War of Independence, to strengthen the Royal Irish Constabulary against the IRA. Most were British veterans of the First World War. A shortage of standard uniforms put them in a mismatch of dark RIC tunics and khaki army trousers — the two colours that gave them their name.

Their reputation was earned quickly. The Tans became known for reprisals against civilians — burned homes, beatings, killings — in answer to IRA attacks. A century later, the name still works in Ireland as shorthand for the worst of that war.

The Twist: Behan's Song Is Aimed at His Dublin Neighbours

Here is what the verses actually do. The song opens not on a battlefield but on a Dublin street, in the 1920s and 30s, with Behan's father Stephen coming home drunk and calling out the neighbours.

Those neighbours were working-class Dubliners, Catholic and Protestant, who had served in the British Army. Stephen Behan's taunt — the line that gives the song its chorus — invites them to come out and fight like men, and to show their wives how they won medals down in Flanders. "Black and Tans" is the insult he throws across the street: in his mouth, it means men who took the King's shilling and served the empire, not the uniformed force of 1920.

Only after that street row do the verses widen to the whole history Stephen is arguing from: Parnell, the executed leaders of 1916 — the men whose story our Grace post tells from inside Kilmainham — and the empire's other wars, in the song's words, how they slew poor Arabs two by two, and Zulus with spears and bows and arrows against rifles.

A Republican Anthem Sung to a Loyalist Tune

The melody carries its own argument. Behan adapted an old Jacobite air, Rosc Catha na Mumhan, and that air traces back to The Boyne Water — an Ulster loyalist song. A republican anthem, sung to a tune with loyalist roots.

That is not an embarrassment to the song; it is how Irish music has always worked. Tunes were common property, and both traditions in Ireland ended up singing some of the same airs with different words and opposite loyalties.

The Behans run through this blog. Dominic's brother Brendan is the writer tied to The Auld Triangle and sung about in Streams of Whiskey — one Dublin family, three posts. And the rebel-song tradition Dominic wrote in runs forward to Men Behind the Wire, the next generation's song about the next round of the same fight.

January 2020: No. 1 in Ireland, as a Protest

The Wolfe Tones recorded it in 1972, on Let the People Sing, and their version is the one the world knows. In January 2020, it proved the song is a living thing and not a museum piece.

When the Irish government proposed an official commemoration of the RIC, the public argument was immediate, and the Wolfe Tones' recording was its soundtrack. The song went to No. 1 on the Ireland and UK iTunes charts, No. 1 on the Scottish singles sales chart, and No. 29 on the Irish chart. The Wolfe Tones gave the proceeds to the Peter McVerry Trust, a homeless charity.

A song about a drunk man shouting across a 1930s Dublin street topped the charts in 2020 as an act of political protest. We play it because that is what it is for: it keeps an argument alive that Ireland is still having, and it does it the way Stephen Behan did — out loud, in company, with the neighbours listening.

Want to dig deeper? Wikipedia's article on Come Out, Ye Black and Tans gives the full account of the song, its verses and the tune's history, and its companion piece on the Wolfe Tones recording covers the 2020 chart run. On video, Davy Holden's The History Behind: 'Come Out Ye Black and Tans' tells the song's story at length.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"The Old Dun Cow" is a comic song about a pub fire. The Old Dun Cow catches fire, and the regulars do not run for the street. They run for the cellar, break into the stock, and drink what they can before the fire gets it. By the end of the night the pub is burning down around a room full of men too drunk to care, and the whole thing is played for laughs.

The song is English, written for the London music hall. Its long life in Irish and Scottish pubs is a story of adoption: a stage song that pub singers took over, kept, and made their own for more than 130 years. That carrying is the story worth telling, and it starts with the man who wrote it.

Harry Wincott Wrote It in 1893 — and Died Broke

"The Old Dun Cow Caught Fire" — Roud 5323 — was written in 1893 by Harry Wincott. Wincott was a songwriter, one of the working writers who supplied the music halls with new material week after week. Harry Champion, one of the biggest music-hall stars of the day, recorded the song in 1911, and a Champion recording was a powerful way for a song to travel.

Wincott claimed to have written some 2,000 songs. He sold them cheap, made little money from them, and died in Yeovil in 1947. That was the music-hall writer's bargain: the songs could outlive everyone who heard them first, while the man who wrote them got a flat fee and moved on to the next one. "The Old Dun Cow" is still sung in pubs on two sides of the Atlantic. Its writer's name is the part that nearly got lost, which is a fair reason to put it back at the top of the post.

The themes that made the song portable were in Wincott's trade: humor, working-class regulars, drink, and a disaster handled by ignoring it as long as possible. No audience needed the joke explained.

Why Everyone Shouts "MacIntyre!"

At some point in the song, the whole room shouts "MacIntyre!" It is the moment audiences wait for, and it is often the loudest thing in the set.

The honest answer about the name is a short one. MacIntyre is in the lyric itself: "Somebody shouted, 'MacIntyre'" is a line of the song, naming one of the regulars caught up in the fire night. Singers and crowds picked that name up and turned it into a shout, and once a room learns to shout it, the shout becomes the tradition. Why that name, beyond the lyric, is not documented — nobody has produced a source that explains it further, and this post is not going to invent one.

That is often how pub songs work. A name, a line, or a chorus gets taken up by the room, and the room's version becomes the real one. The shout is also practical: it gives everyone, including people who do not know the verses, one guaranteed moment to join in at full volume.

How a London Music Hall Song Became a Pub Standard

The song's survival did not depend on recordings. It passed from the music hall into oral tradition — people singing it from memory, writing it down, and teaching it to the next room. Jim Copper, of the Copper Family of Sussex, a family famous for keeping English songs alive across generations, had "The Old Dun Cow" in a handwritten songbook in 1933. A song written for money in 1893 was, forty years on, sitting in a family's handwritten collection, kept because people liked singing it.

That path — stage song to family singing to folk standard — is how a London number ended up as a staple in Irish pubs. Irish and Scottish singers were never short of their own drinking songs. They kept this one because it worked: a simple story, a fire, a cellar, and a shout.

Set it beside the other disaster-and-drink songs in this blog. Dublin Whiskey Fire tells the true story of the 1875 Dublin fire, when burning whiskey ran through the streets — the real event behind a hundred jokes like this one. The Night That Pat Murphy Died is pub chaos played as celebration. Rare Old Mountain Dew puts the drink first and the law second. And Irish Pub Song and Seven Drunken Nights come from the same room, with the same crowd in them.

For the song's paper trail — the Roud number, Harry Champion's 1911 recording, and the Copper Family's handwritten copy — see Mainly Norfolk's page on The Old Dun Cow Caught Fire. Harry Wincott's own hard-luck career is laid out in his Wikipedia biography.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Raggle Taggle Gypsy" tells one of the oldest stories in ballad singing. Three gypsies come singing at a great lady's door. She hears their music, leaves her husband, her house, and her feather bed, and goes off with them — in the best-known telling, with Johnny Faa. Her lord rides after her. She refuses to come back.

The ballad is Child Ballad 200, "The Gypsy Laddie," collected across Britain, Ireland, and the United States. In Scotland, the story grew a set of names: the lady became Lady Jean Hamilton, wife of the Earl of Cassilis, and the gypsy became Johnny Faa. People searching for the Raggle Taggle Gypsy true story are asking about those names — the legend, the evidence, the real Johnny Faa, and the Irish Traveller singer who carried the song into the modern Irish repertoire.

Is the Countess Story True? What the Evidence Says

The Cassilis story is a legend, and the ballad scholarship says so plainly. Francis James Child, who catalogued the ballad, wrote in his notes that "there is little evidence to suggest that the ballad has any historical basis" for the Cassilis elopement. Letters from the Earl of Cassilis to Lady Jean, written after the alleged events, show, in Child's summary, "a high degree of mutual affection and confidence." A husband does not usually write like that to a wife who has just run off and ruined him. Later versions of the ballad, from the eighteenth century onward, attached the Cassilis names to a story that had been sung without them.

That does not make the names worthless. Ballads collect names the way they collect verses — a good story finds a real house, a real earl, and a real lady, and local memory keeps the fit. The elopement is the ballad's story, the Cassilis names are Scotland's addition to it, and the surviving letters point the other way.

The Real Johnny Faa and the Roma in Scotland

Johnny Faa was real, and his people's story in Scotland is harder than the ballad's romance. In 1540, James V recognized John Faa as "lord and earl of Little Egypt" — Little Egypt being the period term tied to the Roma, from which the word "gypsy" itself derives. Within a lifetime, the position reversed completely. By 1609 the Roma were ordered out of Scotland, and in 1611 men named Faa were hanged.

So the figure the ballad turns into a charming singer at the castle door belonged to a community that Scotland first recognized and then persecuted, in the same broad period the ballad comes from. The song keeps the music and the freedom. The record keeps the rest.

The word in the title needs its plain meaning too. "Raggle taggle" is shabby, roughly dressed — the gypsies arrive looking like nothing, and leave with the lady of the house. The ballad's tension runs on that contrast: feather beds on one side, the road on the other, and the lady choosing the road.

In America the ballad became "Gypsy Davey." Versions collected in Virginia keep the lady's refusal to return and drop the Scottish hangings — the love story survives the crossing and the hard context stays home.

John Reilly, Planxty, The Waterboys: How It Became an Irish Standard

The song's Irish life runs through one singer. John Reilly was an Irish Traveller singer from County Roscommon, and his singing is the source behind the version that reached the modern folk world. Planxty took up Reilly's version, and the Waterboys' version is, in turn, the Planxty version of the John Reilly version — a chain you can name, singer to singer.

That chain matters for Ireland. The community in the Irish telling of this story is Irish Travellers, and the song survived in Ireland because a Traveller singer kept it. The Waterboys put "Raggle Taggle Gypsy" on their 1990 album Room to Roam, and their whole folk period was nicknamed the "Raggle Taggle Band" after it — a Scottish ballad naming a rock band's Irish years.

In our own set, Fisherman's Blues is the Waterboys' home post, and this is the song that named their folk era. Caledonia is the honest pair to this post: Scottish first, Irish by adoption. Mary Mack is another song about a woman and other people's plans for her marriage, and Black Velvet Band is another ballad where a woman and an outsider's world change the course of a life.

Irish Music Daily works through the same question searchers ask, in Is Raggle Taggle Gypsy based on a true story?, and the Ballad Index entry for Child 200 collects the sources and recordings for readers who want the full trail.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Fisherman's Blues" is the title track of the Waterboys' 1988 album, and it marks one of the great changes of direction in modern folk-rock: a Scottish band that went to Ireland, fell in with Irish musicians, and came out the other side playing like a session band. Mike Scott, the band's frontman, has summed the story up himself: "Some cynics claim that Scotsman Mike Scott gave Irish music back to the Irish… it was the Irish tradition that influenced him."

That is the Irish story in this song. Ireland was not the Waterboys' home, but it was the place the music was — and Scott went to find it, the same pull that keeps traditional sessions alive wherever Irish music is played.

How the Waterboys Went Irish: Dublin, Wickham, and Spiddal House

The turn began with a fiddle player. Steve Wickham joined the Waterboys in 1985 and brought Scott into Dublin music circles. Scott moved to Ireland in 1986, and the recording that followed was not a single set of sessions but a two-year trawl: sessions at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin from January to March 1986 and again from March to August 1987, a December 1986 session in San Francisco, and finally the Spiddal House sessions in 1988, in the Galway village of Spiddal, where Scott was living. The Spiddal sessions produced the whole second side of the album.

Scott's own count of it is the best summary: "We started recording our fourth album in early '86 and completed it 100 songs and 2 years later." One hundred songs went into the making of Fisherman's Blues, and the album that came out in October 1988 wore its making openly — Irish traditional musicians in the room, tunes between the songs, and a band playing like a session that happened to be recorded.

The title song led the change rather than following it: the Waterboys performed "Fisherman's Blues" on the television show The Tube in 1986, two years before the album, as the first public showing of the new direction. And the folk turn was no retreat from the audience — Fisherman's Blues became the Waterboys' best-selling album, reaching No. 13 in the UK.

What "Fisherman's Blues" Is About: Out of Dry Land

The song itself is plain in its longing. The singer wants out — out of dry land and, as the opening puts it, its bitter memories; out of the city and the working life he has, and into a fisherman's life on the water. There is a love in it too — he wants the woman with him, working and travelling beside him, "travelling on" together. But the engine of the song is the trade itself: exchange the shore for the sea, and a cramped life for an open one.

It is the oldest bargain in the sea songs. Our other post in that world, Fiddler's Green, is sung by an old fisherman looking back at the same choice from the far end of it. And the traditional world the Waterboys stepped into in those sessions is the world of songs like Raggle Taggle Gypsy, which sits in our set too.

The 100-songs fact is our favourite part of the story, and we tell the short version in our 60-second Short on the Spiddal sessions.

To read more: Wikipedia's Fisherman's Blues page lays out the full session history — Windmill Lane, San Francisco, Spiddal House — and the album's chart performance.

— hear us play it live (video above).