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).

Most emigration songs were written long after the leaving. "Thousands Are Sailing" was written in 1988, by a member of The Pogues, about people who were still leaving — and it treats a man who sailed in the age of the coffin ships and a man who flew to New York in the 1980s as characters in the same song.

That is why it works as an anthem. It is not about one wave of emigration. It is about the pattern itself.

Philip Chevron (Born Philip Ryan) and the Pogues, 1988

The writer was Philip Chevron, born Philip Ryan in Dublin in 1957; "Chevron" was taken from the American record label. He wrote the song for The Pogues' 1988 album If I Should Fall from Grace with God, and sang it himself.

Its standing among Irish listeners was summed up in his obituary: the song "struck such a potent chord of authenticity with Irish audiences that it has already passed into folklore," and it is often performed by singers who wrongly assume it is traditional. A song written in a recording studio in the 1980s got mistaken for a folk song within its author's lifetime. That almost never happens, and it happened because the verses are built out of real emigrant detail.

Verse by Verse: Ellis Island, the Coffin Ship, and Broadway

The first verse is a ghost story. "The island it is silent now" is Ellis Island, closed and empty; the torch is the Statue of Liberty's. The man answering the immigration officers' questions is dead: "On a coffin ship I came here, and I never even got so far that they could change my name." The famous Ellis Island story is clerks renaming the arrivals. Chevron's narrator never reached the desk. He is the Famine-era emigrant underneath the whole song, and the modern verses are built on top of him — the same ground as our posts on the American Wake and the Leaving of Liverpool.

By the third verse the emigrant is alive and in modern New York, dancing where Brendan Behan and George M. Cohan made their names before him — the playwright and the songwriter standing for the two things the Irish built in American culture: its stages and its songs. And between the verses comes the second chorus, where "the hand of opportunity draws tickets in a lottery." That line is widely read as the 1980s world of the undocumented Irish in America and the visa lotteries they pinned their hopes on, mailing postcards home "from rooms the daylight never sees." Chevron never spelled it out; that reading is the audience's, and it fits the decade the song came from.

"The Land That Makes Us Refugees": The Chorus That Changes

The chorus does not change its words. It changes its meaning. Sung after the ghost's verse, "thousands are sailing" is the Famine exodus. Sung after the Broadway verse, it is last year's flight out of Dublin. The phrase "the land that makes us refugees" lands on Ireland and America at once — the place that pushed them out and the place that took them in and still kept them strangers.

That double vision is the same one in Fairytale of New York, the Pogues' other great New York emigrant song, and in Body of an American, where the New York Irish gather around a boxer's coffin. Chevron's song is the wide shot of that whole world. Here's a Short clip of us playing it.

The last word on the song belongs to its writer's ending. At Philip Chevron's funeral in October 2013, his coffin was carried out of the church to "Thousands Are Sailing." The fullest single account of the man and the song is Deep Roots Magazine's obituary, and Song Bar's verse-by-verse reading walks the Ellis Island and coffin-ship detail line by line. For the world the song's characters landed in, Inside Irish Music's Where Immigrants Forged One of America's Most Popular Music Genres tells how Irish immigrants built American music.

— hear us play it live (video above).

It is Christmas Eve in a New York drunk tank, and an Irish emigrant is looking back on the life he promised and the one he got. "Fairytale of New York" is the biggest Christmas song in our set, and it contains no tinsel at all — just a couple who came to America with dreams, fell apart, and are still, at the end of it, holding onto each other: “I built my dreams around you.”

The song was written by Shane MacGowan and Jem Finer of the Pogues and released on 23 November 1987, with Kirsty MacColl singing the woman's part. The Pogues were a London-Irish band — second-generation kids playing Irish music in King's Cross pubs — and this is the emigrant Christmas as that generation knew it. MacGowan himself was born on Christmas Day, 25 December 1957, in Pembury, Kent, to Irish parents, and spent long stretches of his childhood with his mother's family in Carney, Co. Tipperary.

How “Fairytale of New York” Was Written: The Bet, the Sailor Song, and Kirsty MacColl

The song took two years to write, and even its starting point is disputed. MacGowan said producer Elvis Costello bet the band they couldn't write a Christmas hit. Accordionist James Fearnley remembered it differently — manager Frank Murray pushing for a Christmas song. Either way, Finer's first version was a song about a sailor in New York missing his wife at Christmas. Finer's wife Marcia called it corny and suggested the plot that stuck: a couple on hard times, arguing their way through Christmas Eve.

The band recorded an attempt in 1986 with bassist Cait O'Riordan singing the female part. She left the band, and producer Steve Lillywhite took the tape home — where his wife, Kirsty MacColl, sang a guide vocal. Her guide vocal is the one on the record. The title came from J. P. Donleavy's novel A Fairy Tale of New York — Donleavy being an Irish-American writer himself.

When we play it, the woman's part is sung by Ryan's wife Janet, who is always up for lending her voice and attitude to it. In 2024 we recorded the song for the Rocking the Suburbs podcast's holiday album Rocking the Holidays — our recording is on the album.

What Is the NYPD Choir? (It Doesn't Exist)

The chorus promises that "the boys of the NYPD choir were singing Galway Bay." There is no NYPD choir, and there never was. For the video, the band used the NYPD Emerald Society Pipes and Drums — who did not know "Galway Bay," so they played and sang the Mickey Mouse Club march instead, and the footage was slowed down to fit. The policeman who throws MacGowan into the drunk tank is actor Matt Dillon.

Inside the song, the drunk tank holds one more of our tunes: the old man sharing the cell is singing "The Rare Old Mountain Dew" when the narrator drifts into the dream that becomes the song. We have a whole post on that one — Rare Old Mountain Dew. The Pogues' other great emigration song is Thousands Are Sailing, and their other song in our set is Body of an American. For the rest of the Christmas cluster, see Pass Me a Pint.

The Lyric Row

Every December, the argument about the song's language comes back, so here are the plain facts. On 18 December 2007, BBC Radio 1 edited the words "faggot" and "slut" from the song — and reversed the decision the same day, after listener criticism. In 2018, RTÉ kept playing it uncensored in Ireland. MacGowan defended the word as belonging to the character singing it, not to himself.

Why an Irish Emigrant Song Became the Biggest Christmas Song

On release, the song reached No. 1 in Ireland, where it stayed for five weeks. In Britain it reached No. 2, kept off the Christmas No. 1 spot by the Pet Shop Boys' "Always on My Mind." It has since become the most-played Christmas song of the 21st century in the UK. And in December 2023, on the day of MacGowan's funeral, it went back to No. 1 in Ireland and was reissued as a charity single for the Dublin Simon Community.

That is the Irish-American story in one song: written by London-Irish musicians, set in New York, sung every December on both sides of the Atlantic by people who know what it costs to leave.

To read more: Wikipedia's Fairytale of New York page has the full history and chart record. The Great Irish Songbook tells the song's story, and Irish Around The World traces MacGowan's Kent and Tipperary roots and the song's yearly return.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Body of an American" is a wake in a song. A dead man's body is carried home to Ireland in a Cadillac, and the people who loved him gather to drink, argue, tell stories and send him off properly. The Pogues released it in 1986 on Poguetry in Motion, an EP produced by Elvis Costello, and it is still sung at wakes — including the police wakes in The Wire.

The man in the coffin is Big Jim Dwyer, a boxer. He never existed. That does not make the song less true: Dwyer stands for a generation of Irishmen who left, made their lives in America, and were carried home at the end.

Shane MacGowan Wrote It — a Son of the Irish Diaspora

The writer matters here. Shane MacGowan was born in Kent, England, to Irish parents. He was a child of the emigration himself — Irish at home, English on the street. The Pogues were a London band singing Irish music with punk energy, and MacGowan wrote about the people he grew up around: the ones who had left Ireland and built their lives elsewhere.

Our post on Thousands Are Sailing covers the leaving itself. "Body of an American" is what comes at the far end of that journey: the leaving is long done, the life has been lived, and now the body is coming back.

Who Was Big Jim Dwyer? The Fictional Boxer Brought Home to Ireland

Dwyer is MacGowan's invention — a boxer who fought his way up in America and whose body is brought home to Ireland when he dies. That is the point. Every Irish family in America had a Big Jim: the uncle or grandfather whose strength built a new life in a hard city, and whose name grew a little bigger every time the story was told.

Dwyer comes home as a "Returned Yank," the figure who was a familiar sight at St Patrick's Day in Boston, New York and Philadelphia — the emigrant who made it in America and never stopped being Irish. The Cadillac that carries him is America's wealth on show in an Irish street, and the local tinkers eye it the way everyone eyes a Returned Yank's success: with respect, and with calculation.

Our post on Fairytale of New York is the other half of MacGowan's America: the emigrants still in the middle of the struggle, arguing in a drunk tank at Christmas. Dwyer's story is that same world, seen from the end of a life that worked out.

The Irish Wake in the Song: Whiskey, Jokes and Lectures on Ancient Irish History

The heart of the song is the wake itself, and MacGowan gives it a timetable. Fifteen minutes in, the whiskey has had its first taste. By five o'clock, in the song's words, every man there is well past sober, and the uncles are giving lectures on ancient Irish history.

That is a real Irish wake, not a stage version of one. A wake was never a quiet, solemn hour. It was a house full of people, food and drink on the table, stories told and retold, arguments, jokes, and pride in the dead person spoken out loud. Grief was in the room, but it shared the room with everything else the person had been.

The wake in this song is the mirror image of the one in our American Wake post. The American wake was the party held for an emigrant leaving alive, because the family expected never to see him again. Dwyer's wake is for the emigrant who came back dead. The send-off is the same either way — whiskey, jokes and stories — and that sameness is the song's argument about how the diaspora handled parting: you marked it together, loudly, and told the stories one more time.

How The Wire Made It Baltimore's Police Wake Song

The song found a second life on television. In The Wire, it is played at the wakes of Baltimore police officers, with the same mix of drink, stories and pride that MacGowan wrote into Dwyer's wake.

That use stuck because it is exact. A police wake in Baltimore runs on the same rules as the wake in the song: the dead man's people gather, the drink comes out, the stories get bigger, and nobody is asked to be quiet about their grief or their pride. A fictional boxer's farewell turned out to describe an American ritual faithfully enough that the ritual adopted the song.

American Songwriter's list of essential MacGowan and Pogues songs puts this one in its proper company, and LitHub's seven Pogues songs that would make great short stories treats Dwyer's wake as the short story it really is.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Rocky Road to Dublin" tells the story of a young man from Tuam, County Galway, who walks to Dublin, takes a ship to Liverpool, and gets into trouble at every stop. The words were written by D. K. Gavan, known as "the Galway Poet," for Harry Clifton, an English music-hall performer who made the song popular in the 1860s.

The narrator is a character written for the stage, and the song is his story: a migrant labourer leaving home to find work, mocked for his accent and his clothes the whole way, and rescued at the end by men from his own county. Ireland took the song back and made it a standard. It has been in the Irish repertoire ever since.

Written by the Galway Poet for Harry Clifton

Gavan wrote the song for Clifton (1832–1872), a star of the English music hall, who popularised it. That was a common arrangement at the time: Irish writers supplied material, London stages supplied the audience, and emigrants in the audience heard their own journey sung back at them.

The tune is older than the words. Sheet music for the tune was published as early as 1841 in The Dublin Magazine, already described as well known in Ireland. The song is catalogued in the Roud Folk Song Index as number 3012.

The narrator is not travelling for pleasure. In the opening he is "off to reap the corn" — leaving Tuam to find harvest work. That one detail sets the song inside the long Irish story of seasonal labour migration to England.

Tuam, Mullingar, Dublin, Liverpool: The Journey Verse by Verse

In Mullingar, the girls mock his clothes and his accent. In Dublin, his bundle is stolen, and while he hunts for the thief he is mocked again for his Connacht brogue — in his own words, "my Connaught brogue wasn't much in vogue."

He is shipped across in the hold with the pigs and is seasick off Holyhead. In Liverpool the locals mock his Irishness, he starts a fight with his blackthorn shillelagh, and he is losing until other Galway men join in on his side.

Read as a list, it is a comic routine. Read as a record, it is what waited for a young Irish labourer on the road: suspicion in every town, safety only among his own. Our post on Leaving of Liverpool covers the same road from the dock, and Thousands Are Sailing covers the emigrant journey at full scale.

A Slip Jig in 9/8: Why Nobody Can Breathe Singing It

The song is set to a slip jig in 9/8 time, which is the plain reason it is a tongue-twister. The rhythm keeps moving in threes, the lines are packed with words, and there is almost nowhere to take a breath. Singers treat getting through it cleanly as a feat in itself, which is part of why it works as a showpiece — Gavan wrote it for a professional stage performer, and it still behaves like one.

The first-person voice is the other half of its staying power. Like the narrator of The Orange and the Green, the Rocky Road narrator tells on himself as much as on anyone else, and the comedy carries a harder story underneath.

An Emigrant Song Ireland Took Back

A song written in Ireland, for an English stage star, about an Irishman being jeered in England, ended up as one of the most Irish songs in the book. That round trip is the diaspora story in miniature: the material went where the audience was, and the audience was leaving.

Wikipedia's article on the song sets out the Gavan and Clifton history, the 1841 tune printing, and the song's later life, including its appearance in Joyce's Ulysses. For a different journey, History Ireland's essay on Peter Lennon's 1967 documentary Rocky Road to Dublin follows an Irish émigré journalist who borrowed this song's title to ask what Ireland had done with its independence.

— hear us play it live (video above).

First, name the song. The one we play is "The Irish Pub," written by Brian Flynn and recorded by The High Kings. Its tune is "Mr. Maguire," a song The Dubliners had a hit with — an old Dublin music-hall-style tune carrying a brand-new lyric. It is not a traditional song and does not pretend to be. It is a joke with a census hidden inside it.

The joke is the chorus: wherever you go around the world, you'll find an Irish pub. The census is the verses, which count the modern Irish diaspora one bar at a time.

"Wherever You Go Around the World, You'll Find an Irish Pub"

The chorus geography runs: they've got one in Honolulu, they've got one in Moscow too, four of them in Sydney and a couple in Kathmandu. The joke lands because it is true. The Irish pub went everywhere the Irish went — and then kept going, into cities the Irish mostly never emigrated to at all, because the pub itself became an export: a room, a name over the door, a promise of music and welcome that travels without a single Irish person needing to be on the plane.

That is the first half of the song's point. The pub is the most successful piece of Irish culture ever shipped. Guinness and whiskey can be bottled; the pub had to be rebuilt, city by city, by whoever was standing there — which leads straight to the verses.

Born in Bolton, Mammy's From Kildare: The Diaspora in One Verse

Look at the staff the lyric assembles. The owner of the pub is Norwegian. The manager comes from Cork. And the lad holding up the bar was born and raised in Bolton, in the north of England, with a mother from Kildare — and he is planning to make his fortune and move back to County Clare.

That one verse holds the whole modern story: emigration out of Ireland, the second generation growing up Irish in England, work found in the trade the diaspora built, and the return dream — make the money, go back to Clare — that runs through half the songs on this blog. The Cork manager is the emigrant. The Bolton lad is the emigrant's child, Irish by his mother, English by his birthplace, working in an Irish pub owned by a Norwegian. Flynn is not inventing a scene. He is describing a Tuesday.

The other pub post on this blog, Old Dun Cow, shows the same institution from the inside — a real neighbourhood pub with a real story, not décor. And Pass Me a Pint is the pub as refuge at Christmas. Together they make the band's small trilogy: the pub as workplace, as neighbourhood, as shelter.

Why Non-Irish Drinkers Feel at Home in an Irish Pub

Here is the part we can testify to ourselves, because we hear it after shows. People with no Irish blood at all tell us they feel welcome in an Irish pub in a way they do not everywhere — that the room expects you to join in, talk to strangers, and sing whether or not you can sing. The song's chorus says the pub is in every city on earth. The audiences we play to are the evidence that the welcome is too.

That is why this song is our closer's neighbour. Kiss Me I'm Irish is the band's other global-Irish good-time song, and the two bookend a set: one says the Irish are everywhere, the other says you are welcome to join them for the length of a chorus.

For the song itself — writer credit, full lyrics, chords, and the note about the "Mr. Maguire" tune — the essential page is Irish Folk Songs' "The Irish Pub". For where the music actually lives inside pubs, Inside Irish Music's Best Pubs in Ireland for Traditional Music is an honest guide to finding a real session and avoiding the tourist traps.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Fare thee well to you, my own true love" — "The Leaving of Liverpool" is a farewell song sung by a sailor shipping out from Liverpool for California, promising the woman he leaves behind that he will come back: "when I return, united we will be." It is one of the best-known songs in the folk repertoire, and it survives because one retired sailor in New York remembered it, word for word, more than fifty years after he learned it.

The song is a working sailor's goodbye, not an emigrant's lament — and the port it leaves from gives it its Irish weight anyway.

Collected in New York: Maitland, Tayluer, and the Library of Congress

The song was collected by William Doerflinger from Richard Maitland, a retired sailor living at Sailors' Snug Harbor on Staten Island, in sessions between 1938 and 1940. Maitland said he had learned it around 1885, aboard the ship General Knox, from a singer from Liverpool. His verdict on the song, decades later: "Yes sir, that song hit the spot!"

Maitland was clear about how the song was used on his voyages: it was an off-watch song, a "forebitter," sung for pleasure in the forecastle rather than a working sea shanty. The association with the capstan comes from the second version Doerflinger collected, in early 1942, from Patrick Tayluer at the Seamen's Church Institute in Manhattan. That session was recorded using Library of Congress equipment, and the recordings were deposited at the Library of Congress — where the song sits today because two old sailors sang it into a microphone in New York.

A Sailor's Farewell, Not an Emigrant's Song

The narrator is a professional sailor, and the details in Maitland's version date themselves. He is shipping aboard the David Crockett, under Captain Burgess, bound for California around Cape Horn. Burgess commanded the David Crockett out of Liverpool between 1863 and 1874, and died at sea in 1874. The singer is not leaving home forever; he is signing on for a voyage, and the whole song leans on his promise to return.

That sets it apart from the true emigration songs in our set. The people in Thousands Are Sailing and American Wake were leaving a life, not a berth. This song pairs the other way: with Leave Her Johnny, the homeward-bound farewell sung at a voyage's end.

Liverpool: The Port a Million Irish Left From

The port is the Irish connection. During the years of the Great Famine, 1845 to 1852, over a million Irish people left from Liverpool's shore. For most emigrants, Liverpool was the last ground of the old world they stood on. A sailor's song that begins on that dock, looking back at the shore, carries that history in its setting even though its singer is a sailor who means to come back.

Irish acts made the song a standard at home. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem had a top-10 hit with it in Ireland in 1964 — the story of that band's rise is told in Inside Irish Music's video on the accident that launched the Clancy Brothers — and Bob Dylan adapted it for his early song "Farewell."

The collection history, including the Library of Congress account, is at Wikipedia, "Leaving of Liverpool", and the National Museum of Ireland's Irish Emigration to America — The Journey covers Liverpool's role in the crossing.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Streams of Whiskey" was the first original song Shane MacGowan wrote for The Pogues, and it appeared on their debut album, Red Roses for Me, in 1984. In it, the singer falls asleep and dreams of Brendan Behan, the Dublin writer who had been dead for twenty years, and Behan gives him advice.

MacGowan was a London Irish writer — born in England to Irish parents, raised between both places — and this song is him placing himself, at the start of his career, in a line of Irish writing that runs back through Behan. That is why it belongs on this blog: it is the diaspora writing itself into the tradition, deliberately and out loud.

The First Song Shane MacGowan Wrote for The Pogues

Red Roses for Me mixed traditional material with MacGowan's first original songs, and "Streams of Whiskey" was the first of them. The Irish Times, writing about MacGowan as a London Irish writer, opens its account with this song: in his first two original songs he was already aligning himself with London's Irish and visionary writers, and placing his writing "within the frame of a dream."

The dream frame matters. MacGowan does not write about Behan from outside. He writes himself into a bar with him, as a younger writer being instructed by an older one. Our other MacGowan song in the set, Fairytale of New York, works the same way from a different city: Irish lives carried on somewhere else, in New York instead of London.

A Dream About Brendan Behan

Behan, who died in 1964, described himself — the line is widely quoted and always attributed to him rather than documented — as "a drinker with a writing problem." In the dream MacGowan gives him, Behan's advice is practical and unsentimental: there is nothing gained "by a wet thing called a tear," and when the world is too dark, you walk into a bar and drink fifteen pints of beer.

Summarised plainly, it is a philosophy of going to the pub when the going gets tough. Coming from Behan, in a dream, it is also a blessing passed from one writer to another: the younger man asks the dead man how to live, and the dead man tells him to keep going and stop crying about it.

The Behan connection runs through this repertoire. The Auld Triangle comes out of Behan's play The Quare Fellow and the Mountjoy Prison world he wrote from. MacGowan dreaming of Behan and a prison song from Behan's play are two ends of the same thread.

London Irish: Writing Ireland from Hammersmith

MacGowan's generation of the Irish in London grew up English in the street and Irish at home, and his writing is built out of that double position. "Streams of Whiskey" is an early, compact example: a London writer, an Irish literary hero, a dream, and a bar.

It sits naturally beside Thousands Are Sailing, MacGowan's song about the emigration his parents' generation made. One song is about the generation that left. This one is about what the generation born abroad did with what it inherited — it turned it into songs, and put itself in the line.

The Irish Times essay Shane MacGowan: Young, gifted and London Irish is the best single read on MacGowan as a diaspora writer, and it starts with this song. The same paper's guide to the lyrics that defined him covers the rest of the catalogue the same way.

— hear us play it live (video above).