"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…

"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…

"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…

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…

"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…

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…

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…

"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…

"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…

"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…

"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…

"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…

"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…

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…

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…

"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…

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…

"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…

"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 —…

"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…

"Four Green Fields" is Tommy Makem's song about an old woman and her land. The woman is Ireland. Her four green fields are Ireland's four provinces — Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connacht — and one of them, she tells us…

"Nancy Whiskey" is a warning sung like a love song. The singer looks back on seven years spent with Nancy, and by the end his money is gone, his trade is gone, and his health is going with them. Nancy…

Sean South was a Limerick city man. He was not from Garryowen — Garryowen is a district of Limerick, and the ballad put him there because the name fit the tune. He died, aged 28, in an attack on a…

"The Jolly Roving Tar" is set in Belfast. A sailor named Johnny comes home with money in his pocket, the lassies love him while the money lasts, he spends a night ashore with his girl, and in the morning he…