When you request a song from an Irish band, be careful what you ask for. When someone asked us to do a Chappell Roan tune, we said no. However, we thought of it on the ride home and "Green Irish Pub", our take on Chappell Roan's "Pink Pony Club", was born. We moved her club into an Irish pub, her pink turned to green, and her lyric rebuilt out of the places, drinks, and Irish words of the rooms we actually play. The tune and the shape are hers.

From West Hollywood to Galway Bay

Newly arrived in Los Angeles from Missouri, Chappell Roan went to The Abbey, a gay bar in West Hollywood, and found for the first time a place where she could truly be herself and not be judged — "complete love and acceptance," as she put it. She turned that experience into the song "Pink Pony Club," released in 2020 and carried to a much bigger audience on her 2023 album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. The Pink Pony Club became shorthand for a place where anyone can walk in and feel welcome exactly as they are.

Our version keeps her opening almost exactly, and then turns it. We both describe a special place where boys and girls can be themselves - "be queens" or simply "enjoy the craic" every single day. The invitation is the same — you belong in this room. While her dreams were of leaving Tennessee, ours are of Ireland — Galway Bay, Killarney, St. Stephen's Green, Seamus' stories and Maeve's distinct voice. It is the same homesick-for-somewhere-else song.

Where the Craic Is Grand: The Words in the Lyric

The Irish use words that mean different things than they mean in America. Two Irish words meet in the line — "Where the craic is grand, it's where I belong" — and both need explaining to an American ear, because neither means quite what it looks like.

Craic — pronounced exactly like "crack" — is the good time itself: the fun, the lively conversation, the stories and the laughter in a room full of people enjoying each other. "What's the craic?" means "what's happening, what's the news?" "Great craic" or "mighty craic" means the night was a brilliant one. It is a social word — you do not really have craic on your own.

Grand does not mean great or large in Ireland. In everyday Irish use, grand means fine, okay, good, no problem. "I'm grand" means "I'm fine." "It'll be grand" means "it will work out — stop worrying." Our lyric uses it twice, and the second use is the truer one: "Every night's the same old thing — to me that is grand." Grand is not excitement. Grand is contentment — the same room, the same songs, the same people, and that being enough. So "the craic is grand" is a small sentence doing double duty: the fun in this place is good, and the people having it are fine — fine as they are, in this room, right now. That is acceptance in one syllable, and it is why the next line, "it's where I belong," lands.

The rest of the lyric speaks pub fluently, and two more phrases are worth translating:

Sláinte. "With the black stuff firm in hand, I slainte to the band." Sláinte is the Irish toast — pronounced roughly "SLAWN-cha," and it means "health." You are not just saying cheers; you are wishing everybody at the table good health. The black stuff, for anyone who has never ordered it, is Guinness.

Split the G is the Guinness drinker's game: your first gulp of a fresh pint should leave the line between beer and foam sitting right through the middle of the "G" on the Guinness glass. Too little and you have not committed; too much and you have blown past it. It is a small feat, but a real one — the kind you want witnesses for.

When we get to "God, what have you done?" in Roan's version it is the scream of a horrified mother, and the singer answers in defiance. In ours we are calling a friend who isn't at the pub yet, telling them I just split the G and you didn't get to witness it! Get down to the pub, brother. You are missing all of this.

Keeping the Heart of the Original: "It's Where I Belong"

A colour swap alone would just be a joke — pink to green, the same trick as our Emerald Rain, and we have already made that joke properly once. This one asked for more care, because "Pink Pony Club" is not really about a club. It is about the relief of finding the place where you stop apologizing for who you are.

So that is what we kept, and the lyric keeps returning to it: "It's where I belong" closes the pre-chorus, every time, and the second refrain says it from the other side — "I could be stuck at home, but here I'm not alone." The Irish pub can carry that meaning. We make that case at length in our post on the Irish Pub Song: people with no Irish blood at all tell us they feel welcome in an Irish pub in a way they do not everywhere, because the room expects you to join in. If you don't know how, we'll show you.

Our bridge is where the two songs shake hands most honestly. Roan's singer promises she has not left home behind. Ours is blunter about adult life: "Don't think I've left you all behind — kids to raise and bills to pay and much more on my mind." The pub is not an escape from that life; we shouldn't be there every day. But the bridge ends with the most Irish move in the whole song: "raise a glass and remember all those who could not stay." That is the emigrant story - people we left behind, lost connection with, or who have passed away. They all deserve to be remembered and the pub is a place where their story can be shared.

That may be why audiences have taken to it. Our Short of the song is one of the most-watched clips on our channel. The song now works from both ends at once: half the room knows the melody because they love the original, and the other half knows what we are describing with our version because they live it — Dirty Old Town on the band's set list and the bodhrán beating under all of it, just like the lyric says.

To hear it from Roan herself: her interview with V Magazine tells the Abbey story in her own words, and Mental Floss traces craic from Scots "crack" to the Irish spelling in What Does the Irish Word 'Craic' Mean?

— hear us play it live (video above).

"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).

"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).

Charlie rides the Boston subway forever because he cannot pay the extra nickel to get off. That is the whole plot of "Charlie on the MTA" — and behind the joke sits a real mayor's race, a real fare fight, a candidate who finished last, and a song that outlasted every politician in the story.

Boston is the most Irish-American big city in the United States, and this is its song by adoption. The candidate at the centre of it was an O'Brien, and the song's second life was sealed by Boston's Irish-American punk band, the Dropkick Murphys. It sits in our set as an Irish-American city song, the same way Body of an American does.

Boston, 1949: A Nickel Exit Fare and a Mayor's Race

In 1949, Boston's transit system — by then the Metropolitan Transit Authority — charged some riders an extra exit fare on top of the fare they had already paid. To working people, it was a tax on getting home.

Walter A. O'Brien, the Progressive Party candidate for mayor that year, campaigned against it, and his campaign had a song. Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Lomax Hawes wrote "Charlie on the MTA" for him: a ordinary working man, handed a sandwich by his wife as the train goes through the station, riding beneath the streets of Boston because he cannot raise the extra nickel to get off.

O'Brien could not afford radio advertising, so the campaign played its songs from a sound truck touring the city. He was fined $10 for disturbing the peace for doing it. He finished last in the election. But the song did its work anyway: it helped protesters gather roughly 100,000 signatures against the fare increase, and Charlie's ride became the argument everyone in Boston could hum.

The tune the song rides on is older than the campaign. It comes from "The Ship That Never Returned," the same melody family as "Wreck of the Old 97" — Charlie was set, deliberately, in the long American line of songs about men who never get home.

Why the Kingston Trio Sang ‘George’ O'Brien, Not Walter

The song became a national hit in 1959, when the Kingston Trio recorded it. By then, Walter O'Brien's politics were a problem for a commercial record: the Progressive Party had been branded communist-leaning in the McCarthy years, and naming its candidate could have cost the Trio airplay and bookings.

So the Trio changed one word. Their Charlie rides for "George O'Brien," a man who never existed. The fare, the wife, the sandwich and the eternal ride all stayed exactly the same — only the candidate's first name was scrubbed out.

The song travelled further than Boston in those years. When the Kingston Trio version became a hit, sympathisers as far away as Germany mailed nickels to the transit authority to free Charlie.

Skinhead on the MBTA: Dropkick Murphys Take Charlie Punk (1998)

Charlie's route into the Irish-American pub repertoire runs through one band. In 1998, the Dropkick Murphys — Boston's own Irish-American punk band, formed in the city's Irish working-class neighbourhoods — remade the song as “Skinhead on the MBTA.”

That recording is the bridge between a 1949 campaign song and the set list of a band like ours. The Dropkicks took Charlie out of the folk-revival world and put him in the Irish-American bar-band world, where he has stayed. Our post on Fairytale of New York tells the same kind of story for another city: a song about belonging to a place that is not Ireland, written by the children of people who left it.

2004: The Transit System Names Its Card After the Man It Trapped

The ending is the best part, and it is true. In 2004, Boston's transit authority — now the MBTA — introduced its reusable fare card and named it the CharlieCard, after the man its predecessor's fare policy had trapped underground. The Kingston Trio performed at the dedication, and Governor Mitt Romney attended.

The system that once fined a candidate $10 for singing about its fares now puts Charlie's name in every rider's wallet. Walter O'Brien lost his election and had his name taken out of his own song. Charlie never got off the train. He won anyway.

Want the full history? The MBTA's own article on Bess Lomax Hawes, the folklorist who co-wrote the song covers the campaign, the signatures, the Dropkick Murphys remake and the CharlieCard, and Wikipedia's M.T.A. (song) article traces the tune back to “The Ship That Never Returned.”

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Whiskey, you're the devil, you're leading me astray" is sung like a love song, and that is the joke and the truth of it at once. The singer is not quitting. He is toasting the thing that ruins him, in a chorus that has him marching off to war and emigrating to America in the same breath.

It is a drinking song with a soldier's boots on. War first, emigration second, and whiskey driving both.

Printed in New York, 1873: The Song's Irish-American Paper Trail

The song is often credited to Jerry Barrington, who published it in New York in 1873, and a very similar set of words, "Whisky, You're a Villyan," was already in print in 1868. A song printed in New York in the 1870s is not just an Irish artefact — it is an Irish-American one, made for the emigrant market that had already crossed.

An older broadside called "John and Moll" is sometimes named as a source, though the trail there is thin and the claim is usually hedged even by the people making it. What is documented is where the modern singers got it. Liam Clancy sang it in 1956 on The Lark in the Morning, and in the Clancy Brothers' own sleeve notes Liam said it was the one song "we can really claim we learned at mother's knee" — from her family's pub in Carrick-on-Suir. A song that may have been printed in New York was carried in the Clancys' repertoire by a pub in Tipperary. That round trip is the Irish-American story in miniature.

"Off to Portugal and Spain": Whiskey and the Soldier

The verses are a soldier's march. The singer is off to Portugal and Spain with the armies of the Peninsular War generation, and whiskey is his companion, his courage, and his trouble on the road. Drink and soldiering went together in that world — the ration, the tavern before the battle, the toast after it — and the song does not separate them. The devil of the title is not an abstraction. He is poured, carried, and marched with.

That pairing is the song's argument. Whiskey consoles the soldier and leads him astray in the same verse, and the singer knows it and sings anyway. Compare Nancy Whiskey, where whiskey ruins a man by seduction, and Wild Rover — the temperance pair to this song: one rover swears off for good, and this drinker never does.

"You're Leading Me Astray… to Amerikay"

The chorus ends the journey: whiskey leads him "over hills and mountains and to Amerikay." In four lines the song covers the whole arc — the old country's wars, the road, and the ship west. The devil did not just ruin men where they stood; he moved them across an ocean, and a good many of the songs in this blog start exactly where this one ends.

It belongs on the shelf with our other whiskey songs: Whiskey in the Jar, the robber's song, and Rare Old Mountain Dew, the poitín panel of the same picture.

The print history, recordings, and the Barrington 1873 credit are laid out at Mainly Norfolk's Whiskey You're the Devil page, and the Carrick-on-Suir source is in the Clancy Brothers' Hearty and Hellish liner notes at The Balladeers.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Pass Me a Pint" is a Christmas song about a man who is not feeling Christmas. The decorations, the gifts, and the mistletoe are all lost on him. His holiday wish is short: a pint, and the company of the person he loves, and he will take his chances on the season from there. One line sums him up — he turns the rest down because "I found my holiday inside a glass."

The song was written and recorded by Johnnyswim, a modern American duo, and it has become a December favorite in our sets. It earns its place in a pub band's Christmas run for a simple reason: it is built like the pub songs around it. This post says plainly what the song is, where it comes from, and why an Irish pub band sings it every December.

A Modern Song That Sounds Like an Old Pub Christmas Song

Johnnyswim are Abner Ramirez and Amanda Sudano, a husband-and-wife duo who met in Nashville in 2005. They are a U.S. folk-pop act, not a traditional band, and "Pass Me a Pint" is a modern original, not an old song they rescued. It appears on the duo's Christmas releases, A Johnnyswim Christmas and Another Johnnyswim Christmas, and they have performed it for Garden & Gun's Back Porch Sessions, which is a good setting for it: a porch, a small audience, and a song that works at close range.

Listeners hear the pub in it even without knowing the writers. One holiday-album reviewer described "Pass Me A Pint" as feeling "like an old Celtic drinking song, but with a modern twist." That is the song's whole trick, stated by somebody with no stake in it. The structure is the giveaway: a plain-spoken narrator, a short list of things he does not want, a chorus built around a pint, and a sentiment that stays just this side of sentimental. Strip the production away and it sits comfortably next to songs a century older, because it follows their rules.

The grump himself is a pub type, not a Christmas invention. Every bar has the man who announces he is not doing Christmas this year, and every bar watches him soften by the second drink. The song gives him three minutes and a chorus, and lets the pint and his love split the credit for saving his season.

Why an Irish Pub Band Sings a Johnnyswim Song

Our December sets are a cluster, and this song has a defined seat in it. Fairytale of New York is the heavyweight: a real Irish diaspora Christmas song, set in New York, unsentimental in a harder way. "Pass Me a Pint" is an American duo borrowing the pub spirit that "Fairytale" comes from honestly, and playing the two in the same season explains both of them. One is the tradition. The other is what the tradition sounds like when a Nashville act tries it on — and finds it fits.

Auld Lang Syne closes the seasonal run, the song everybody already knows the words to. And the pint-first humor is not seasonal for us at all: Drinking in the Day and Going Out For One live on that shelf the rest of the year. "Pass Me a Pint" is the December entry in a year-round category — the song about the man, the bar, and the one drink that is never just one consideration.

The Grump in Every December Room

Practically, the song works because we play where pints are passed. In December our rooms are full of office parties, home-for-Christmas regulars, and people who have been dragged out and plan to enjoy it anyway. A three-minute song for the one person at the table who claims to hate all of it lands every time, because there is always that person, and everyone else at the table knows who it is. It has become a band and fan favorite around the holidays for exactly that reason.

This is a seasonal post for a seasonal song. Its search life runs through December — people look the song up after hearing it, the way they look up every Christmas song they half-know — so the band resurfaces it each year with the rest of the Christmas cluster rather than expecting it to work in July.

To hear Johnnyswim's own version in a live setting, the Garden & Gun Johnnyswim archive has their Back Porch Sessions performance, and the duo's background is in the Qobuz artist biography.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"All of the Hard Days Are Gone" is an Irish-American song, written inside the American Celtic scene, that singers in Ireland then took home and recorded as their own.

This is an optimistic tune to lift the spirits, especially after a few of our more depressing songs about war and famine. But it is also a good example of how Irish music actually moves in the modern world — not in one direction, from Ireland outwards, but back and forth across the Atlantic, picking up new voices at both ends.

Kevin McKrell and the American Celtic Scene

Co-founded by Kevin McKrell in 1978, the band Donnybrook Fair released Tunnel Tigers in 1982. The album earned acclaim as "a landmark of the form" by pairing the swagger of the Clancy Brothers with an upstate New York sensibilities—offering an American perspective on Irish music that developed its own distinct voice rather than simply replicating traditional styles.

When McKrell established The McKrells in 1998, he integrated bluegrass elements into this Irish foundation. This blend reflects the broader evolution of Irish music in the United States, where it flourished alongside folk, country, and bluegrass rather than in isolation, producing songs that bear the imprint of multiple musical traditions.

A product of this environment, "All of the Hard Days Are Gone" carries the sound of an age-old Irish pub standard—and though it has earned that status through widespread performance, its history is far more recent than many listeners realize.

How a New York Song Got Recorded Back in Ireland

The most compelling evidence of the song's transatlantic journey lies in the diverse artists who have recorded it. Across the United States, it was embraced by Bob Shane and The Kingston Trio. Meanwhile in Ireland, it was taken up by Seamus Kennedy, The Druids, The Fureys, and the Dublin City Ramblers. Its reach expanded even further around the globe, recorded by Pat McKernan in Australia and North Sea Gas in Scotland.

This recorded legacy shows the Irish diaspora operating in a less conventional direction. Historically, the primary narrative centered on Irish emigrants carrying traditional songs abroad—as depicted in tunes like Thousands Are Sailing. In this instance, the cultural flow reversed. Drawing on the living traditions nurtured by his community in New York, an American songwriter crafted a song that resonated so deeply back in Ireland that local performers adopted it into the collective repertoire.

Because music travels without geographical boundaries, a song ultimately belongs to any performer who preserves and honors it—and this piece continues to thrive across three continents.

A Toast, Not a Lament: What the Chorus Is Doing

The strength of the song rests in its directness. Its chorus functions as a communal toast, declaring that the difficult times are behind, raising glasses high, and promising "it's all beer and whisky and songs from now on".

While Irish and Irish-American heritage features many sorrowful laments of departure and hardship—such as the poignant farewells captured in American Wake—this track offers the uplifting counterpart to that story. It celebrates the bright future those journeys sought to achieve: a time when the labor is finished, economic strains have eased, and friends gather to celebrate surviving the struggle together.

That is why it works where we use it, as a lift near the end of a night. There is nothing to explain and nothing to decode. The singer raises a glass, the room answers, and for the length of one chorus the hard days are gone — which, in a pub, is close enough to true.

For more on McKrell, Donnybrook Fair, and the full list of artists who have recorded this song, see the Oswego County Today profile of The McKrells.

— hear us play it live (video above).

Start with the honest line: "Jolene" is a Tennessee song by a Tennessee writer. It is not Irish, and this post will not dress it up as Irish. We were playing it in Maryland pubs before Beyoncé's version arrived in 2024 — that is the band's only claim on it, and it happens to be true.

What the song does have is one of the best-documented origins in country music, told the same way by its writer for decades. Dolly Parton has never been vague about who Jolene was, where the name came from, or what the song cost her to sing.

The True Story: A Bank Teller, a Husband, and a Joke That Became a Song

Parton's husband, Carl Dean, was spending time at the bank — because a red-headed bank teller had a crush on him, and he was enjoying the attention. Parton has told it as a running joke between them: "You're spending a lot of time at the bank. I don't believe we've got that kind of money." The teller flirted; Dean lingered; Parton watched it happen and did what she does — she wrote it down.

Her verdict on the song, given to NPR in 2008, is the key to it: she calls it "really an innocent song all around, but sounds like a dreadful one." Nothing in the lyric is a threat. The singer begs. She lays out everything the other woman has — the beauty, the voice, the pick of men — and admits her own happiness depends on a stranger's mercy. It is a plea from a woman who believes she is losing.

The song was released as a single in October 1973, became the title track of Parton's album Jolene, and was her second No. 1 country hit.

Where the Name Jolene Came From

The bank teller's name is not in the song, and that is deliberate. After a show, a young fan asked Parton for an autograph. Parton loved the girl's name — Jolene — told her "I'm going to write a song about that," and then used the fan's name for the teller, in her words, to protect the guilty.

Two women, neither of them named in anger, share the song: the child who supplied the name and the teller who supplied the story. Parton calls "Jolene" the most-recorded song she has written — the last count she quoted was around 450 recordings by other artists. She has also said she wrote "Jolene" and "I Will Always Love You" on the same day in 1972 — her account, given consistently, and two of the most recorded songs in American music from one day's work is the kind of fact a writer earns the right to tell.

A Plea, Not a Threat: Parton's Jolene vs. Beyoncé's

Which brings the title home. When Beyoncé recorded "Jolene" on Cowboy Carter in 2024, she rewrote it: her singer does not beg Jolene to stay away — she warns her. Same melody, opposite stance. We had been singing Parton's version, the plea, in pubs for years before that, and the difference between the two is the difference between the whole song's meaning: one woman asking for mercy, another issuing a threat. They are not the same song sharing a name by accident — they are an argument about it.

Our set has a small shelf of these American standards. House of the Rising Sun is the other guest post, and Emerald Rain is the band remaking a modern standard its own way. And the stance of Parton's singer — a person who knows the beloved is beyond reach and sings anyway — is one Irish song knows well: Patrick Kavanagh's singer in Raglan Road is in the same position, an ocean away.

An American Cousin: Appalachia and the Ballad Tradition

The connection to this blog is one step back, and it is real. Parton writes out of Appalachia, and Appalachian mountain music was made by mingling traditions — the Smithsonian Folklife Festival describes it as the meeting of English, Scottish, Irish, German, African American, and Native American music, with early collectors noting its closeness to the traditions of the British Isles. The ballads and fiddle tunes crossed the Atlantic with settlers, Scots-Irish and Irish among them, and became old-time and then country music. "Jolene" is a named woman, a story told straight, and a singer who knows she is losing — the Irish ballad's American cousin, recognisable at one remove.

For more: Mental Floss on the two classics written on the same day tells that story reliably; the Country Music Hall of Fame clip, via iHeart has Parton herself on the name and the 450 recordings; and the Smithsonian's glimpse of Appalachian mountain music backs it.

— hear us play it live (video above).

Let's be plain about this one: "Emerald Rain" is not a traditional Irish song. It is Prince's "Purple Rain" with one word changed — purple out, emerald in — and it has become one of our favourite ways to close a night in a pub. The joke is ours. But the phrase it plays on is not a joke at all, and it is older and more serious than most people realise.

"Emerald Isle" sounds like something a tourist board invented to sell postcards. It isn't. It comes out of 1790s revolutionary Ireland, from the same decade as the 1798 Rising, and it was written by a man who helped found the United Irishmen.

Why Is Ireland Called the Emerald Isle?

The first use of "Emerald Isle" in print comes from William Drennan, a Belfast physician and a co-founder of the United Irishmen, in his 1795 poem "When Erin First Rose." Writing about Ireland, Drennan called it "the em'rald of Europe" and addressed "the men of the Emerald Isle." This was political poetry, not scenery writing — Drennan and the United Irishmen were arguing for an Ireland that governed itself, a few years before the rising of 1798 put that argument into the field.

So the nickname everyone now treats as a compliment about green fields started as a statement about a nation. The rain and the grass are real, and Ireland has both in quantity, but the name stuck because a revolutionary poet put it in print, not because the landscape needed describing. That is the piece of Irish history hiding inside our closer, and it is why the song earns its place on this blog.

Prince's “Purple Rain” (1984), One Word Changed

The song we borrowed needs no selling, but it deserves its credit. "Purple Rain" is the title track of Prince and the Revolution's album of 25 June 1984, released alongside the film of the same name. It is a ballad about being with the one you love and letting faith guide you through the end of the world — that is Prince's own explanation of what he wrote. It became his signature song, the one he closed shows with for the rest of his career.

Our change is exactly one word, and it does all the work. Sung in an American accent in an arena, it is Prince's. Sung in a pub, with the whole room on the chorus and "emerald" carrying two hundred years of Ireland with it, it becomes something a crowd can claim as its own. Songs travel and change like that; this blog is full of traditional songs that did the same journey over centuries. Ours just did it faster, and with an electric guitar line everyone already knows.

Why It Works as a Pub Closer

A closer has one job: send the room out together, on a song everybody can sing whether or not they knew it when they sat down. That is what a pub song is for — we make the same case in our post on Irish Pub Song

. “Emerald Rain” does it by borrowing a melody the whole room already has in its bones.

And for a real Irish rain song from our set — a boy, a fishing trip, and a jar of stream water outside Belfast — see Van Morrison's And It Stoned Me, the genuine article next to our borrowed one.

To read more: Mental Floss tells the Drennan story in How Ireland Became the “Emerald Isle”, and Far Out Magazine covers the story behind Prince's “Purple Rain”.

— hear us play it live (video above).

This post starts with an honest admission: "The House of the Rising Sun" is not an Irish song, and no Irish origin for it has been verified. It is an Appalachian ballad — an old song that crossed the Atlantic with emigrants, changed its setting and its singer in America, and came back around the world through the folk revival. Plenty of songs on this blog that did start in Ireland travelled the same road. This one is a guest in the set, and it earns its place with a documented story better than most songs get.

The title's question — brothel or gambling den? — has a real answer, and it depends on which version you are listening to.

Georgia Turner, 16, Sang It Into the Library of Congress in 1937

In September 1937, the collector Alan Lomax recorded a sixteen-year-old girl named Georgia Turner, a miner's daughter in Middlesboro, Kentucky, singing a song she called "The Rising Sun Blues." Lomax deposited the recording at the Library of Congress and published her lyrics in Our Singing Country in 1941. Her version became the ancestor of the hundreds that followed: Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, and Josh White all learned and recorded it in her line.

She was not the first to record it. The oldest known recording is by Clarence "Tom" Ashley and Gwen Foster, cut in 1933 and released by Vocalion as "Rising Sun Blues." Ashley had learned it from his grandfather. So the song's paper trail starts in the Appalachian mountains in the 1930s, with a family handing it down — the same way songs moved around Ireland, except this family was in Kentucky.

Was the Rising Sun a Brothel? What the Early Lyrics Say

In Georgia Turner's version, the house in New Orleans has been the ruin of many a poor girl — and the singer is one of them, warning her family to keep her younger kin away from the life she fell into. The singer is a woman, and in her lyric the house reads plainly as a brothel: a place that took girls in and used them up.

The gambling-den and prison readings came later, and they came from a change in the song. When the singer became a man — a gambler who ruined himself in New Orleans — the house had to become something a man could be ruined by, and gambling, drink, and prison filled the space the brothel had occupied. So the answer to the title is: it depends which singer you ask. The earliest documented version says brothel, in a girl's voice.

How a Girl's Song Became a Boy's Song: Van Ronk, Dylan, The Animals

The Animals, a band from Newcastle, England, took the song to No. 1 in the UK, the US, and Canada in 1964 — and they learned it from Bob Dylan's 1962 debut album. Dylan had taken his arrangement from Dave Van Ronk, a mainstay of the New York folk scene, who had made the singer male. In three steps — Van Ronk to Dylan to The Animals — a Kentucky girl's warning became a British band's hit about a ruined young man, and that is the version the whole world now knows.

It is the folk revival running in reverse: an American mountain ballad crossing the Atlantic eastward and coming home as rock and roll. Our post on Black Velvet Band shows a documented crossing in the usual direction, an old ballad from Ireland and England carried to Australia. And our other American guest, Jolene, is paired with this one — both are songs we play whose real stories are American, told straight. The blog's Moonshiner post covers another song the revival carried everywhere.

To follow the whole journey, read Appalachian History's interview with Ted Anthony, whose book Chasing the Rising Sun tracked more than 400 versions of the song; the book itself is on the Internet Archive. As related viewing, Inside Irish Music's The Song Bob Dylan "Stole" From Ireland covers the Dylan-and-borrowing story from the Irish side — not a source on this song, but the same Atlantic traffic, seen from the other shore.

— hear us play it live (video above).