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).

"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).

"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).

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).

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 police barracks in Brookeborough, County Fermanagh, on the night of 31 December 1956 – 1 January 1957, and within a week a ballad about him was in print. That speed is the story of this song.

South was a devout Catholic and a committed republican who wrote for nationalist publications. He joined the IRA's Border Campaign, the "Campaign of Resistance to British Occupation," codenamed Operation Harvest, which had begun on 12 December 1956.

Brookeborough, New Year's Day 1957: What Went Wrong

The target was the Royal Ulster Constabulary barracks at Brookeborough. The column was led by Seán Garland. The attack failed on its own equipment: the mines the raiders brought did not explode, and a grenade thrown at the barracks bounced back and exploded under their own truck.

South and Fergal O'Hanlon, a 19-year-old from Monaghan, were badly wounded and left unconscious in a cow byre, where they died. The rest of the column got away. South's funeral in Limerick drew thousands — one account puts the crowd in excess of 40,000 — and the deaths became the best-known episode of the whole campaign.

Two Ballads from One Raid: Sean South and The Patriot Game

The ballad "Sean South of Garryowen" was written by Seán Costello of County Limerick, set to the tune of "Roddy McCorley," and first published in The Irish Catholic within a week of South's death. A song in print seven days after the event is not a history lesson. It is a community deciding, immediately, how a death will be remembered.

The same raid produced a second famous ballad. Dominic Behan wrote "The Patriot Game" about Fergal O'Hanlon, the younger man who died beside South. Two songs from one failed raid, one for each of the dead men, both still sung. Behan's own best-known song in our set is Come Out Ye Black and Tans.

The older model for this kind of ballad is The Rising of the Moon: a named place, a planned fight, and a song that outlives the plan by generations.

Why a Failed Campaign Produced a Lasting Song

The Border Campaign itself failed. It ran from December 1956 to 26 February 1962 and was called off because it did not have the support it needed. Judged as a military campaign, Brookeborough was a disaster and the campaign a dead end.

Judged by its songs and its funerals, it landed differently. In the 1957 general election in the Republic, held weeks after the funerals, Sinn Féin took its highest vote share in thirty years and won four seats. The ballad is part of that machinery: it fixed South's name to a tune people already knew, and it is still doing that work in pub sets, including ours. The generation after South produced its own prison and internment songs — Bobby Sands writing in Back Home in Derry, and the internment song Men Behind the Wire.

For the documented record, the CAIN archive at Ulster University keeps a chronology of the Border Campaign period, including the Brookeborough entry and the 1957 election. History Ireland's correspondence on the 50th anniversary of South's death argues over the details and over how he should be remembered, and is worth reading for exactly that reason. Davy Holden also tells the story in a one-minute Short, The Story of Seán South.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Jackie" is the opening track of The Lion and the Cobra, the 1987 debut album by Sinéad O'Connor, a singer from Dublin. It is a shore lament in the old style: a woman waits for her sailor, Jackie, and is told he has been lost at sea. She refuses to believe it. He knows that sea like the back of his hand, she says. He will come back.

Then the lyric turns. The woman doing the waiting gives her own account of herself: she has been dead for twenty years, washing the sand with her ghostly tears. The narrator is the ghost. She is not waiting on the shore because she cannot leave it. She is part of it.

A Ghost Story Opens a Debut (1987)

Every song on The Lion and the Cobra was written or co-written by O'Connor herself, and several of them — including this opener — were written when she was still a teenager. She was twenty when the album appeared in 1987. Consider what that means as a career decision: an unknown singer, given a debut album, opens it not with a single or a showcase but with a slow ghost ballad sung by a dead woman.

AllMusic's review of the album singles out "Jackie" alongside "Troy" and "Jerusalem" for their "hushed, quiet intensity," on a debut it calls a sensation on its 1987 release. The quiet was the statement. Before the hits and the controversies that made her famous worldwide, the first thing Sinéad O'Connor chose to sing in public was this.

The Women Who Waited: "Jackie" and the Old Shore Ballads

Nothing about the song's furniture is new, and that is deliberate craft from a teenage writer working inside a tradition. The waiting woman. The messenger with bad news. The refusal to accept it — she argues with the news the way the women in the old ballads argue, on evidence: he knew that sea too well to be taken by it. And the shore itself, the strip of ground between the living and the dead, which is where this whole family of songs is set.

The women who stayed ashore while the men went to sea run through this blog's sea songs. Fiddler's Green is the old tradition's answer to the danger — a paradise waiting for sailors who never came home. In "Jackie," the sailor simply never comes back, and the paradise is not his; the waiting is hers, forever. Leave Her Johnny is the shore side of the same story sung from the ship, and Ride On is Christy Moore's parting song — the living man's goodbye, set against this dead woman's refusal to say it.

One distinction to keep clean: "Jackie" is not a traditional ballad, and no traditional source for it has been established. It is an original song by an Irish writer who had absorbed the old ballads deeply enough, young enough, to write a new one that behaves like them. The Irish angle of this post is the singer and the tradition she was working in — nothing more, and it does not need to be more.

Why We Play It

We play it because a pub set needs one moment of genuine quiet, and because audiences who know O'Connor only from one famous song discover that the first track she ever released was a ghost story about the sea. A Dublin teenager wrote the women-who-waited tradition a new verse. It holds a room.

To read further: the New York Review of Books' appreciation of O'Connor is the strongest short piece on her as a songwriter, including "Jackie" written in her teens, and Grammy.com's five essential tracks is the way in for readers who know only the famous one. On the supernatural inside Irish song generally, Inside Irish Music's Ghosts, The Banshee, Fairies covers exactly this post's ground.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Zombie" is the modern end of the story this blog's rebel songs tell. It was written in 1993 by Dolores O'Riordan of The Cranberries, from Limerick — an Irishwoman, touring in England, saying in plain terms that violence done in Ireland's name was not done in hers.

The Cranberries released it in 1994 as the lead single from No Need to Argue, and it became one of the defining songs of the Troubles — not because it took a side, but because it refused one.

Warrington, March 20, 1993: Johnathan Ball and Tim Parry

On March 20, 1993, two IRA bombs exploded in the town of Warrington, in England. They killed two children: Johnathan Ball, aged three, and Tim Parry, aged twelve. Island Records' own summary puts the toll at two children killed and 56 others injured.

O'Riordan was on tour in England at the time. She remembered it directly: there were a lot of bombs going off in London, a child was killed when a bomb was put in a rubbish bin — "that's why there's that line in the song, 'A child is slowly taken'" — and she was on a tour bus, near where it happened. The Troubles were a conflict that ran from the late 1960s to 1998 between unionists and loyalists who wanted Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom and republicans and nationalists who wanted a united Ireland. Warrington was what that war looked like when it crossed the Irish Sea: a shopping street, on a Saturday, and two boys dead.

"It's Not Me, It's Not My Family": What Dolores O'Riordan Said She Meant

Her explanation of the song never hid behind poetry: "The IRA are not me. I'm not the IRA. The Cranberries are not the IRA. My family are not." Writing the song, she said, she was saying "it's not me" — that even though she was Irish, she didn't do it. It was not Ireland, in her words, but "some idiots living in the past."

That is also what the title means. The "zombie" is not one side or the other; it is the reflex itself. Her chorus reaches back — "it's the same old theme since 1916" — to argue that people were still fighting, and still dying, over a war generations old. We read the zombie as the fighter on autopilot, and that reading fits everything she said about the song: the enemy in "Zombie" is the inheritance, not a flag.

It is the same argument as Sunday Bloody Sunday — a call for peace, not a side. Put it next to Back Home in Derry, Bobby Sands' song sung from inside the republican tradition "Zombie" is answering, and Men Behind the Wire, the internment song from the conflict's earlier chapter, and you can walk the whole Troubles thread through three songs.

Why Irish Rugby Crowds Sing It Now (and What Tim Parry's Father Said)

The song's afterlife is the part of the story that matters most. After O'Riordan's death in January 2018, Colin Parry — Tim Parry's father — thanked her for lyrics he called "both majestic and also very real." In 2023, when Irish rugby crowds singing "Zombie" at the World Cup drew controversy, Parry said that having read the words he was "convinced it was a call for peace after the Warrington bombing." The bereaved father's verdict on the song written about his son's killing: it was a call for peace.

The crowds were not wrong either. In April 2020, "Zombie" became the first song by an Irish band to pass one billion views on YouTube — a protest song from Limerick, sung back now by stadium crowds as an anthem, with the blessing of the family that paid the highest price for what it protests.

The Roscommon Herald's interview with Colin Parry gives his reading in his own words, and Rock Celebrities' account of the song carries the full O'Riordan interview. Inside Irish Music tells her own story in The Heartbreaking Real Story of Dolores O'Riordan, and for the ground-level context of the conflict, Davy Holden's Walking Tour of the Troubles: Belfast walks the streets the war was fought on.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Grace" tells the true story of Joseph Mary Plunkett and Grace Gifford, who were married in the chapel of Kilmainham Gaol late on 3 May 1916, hours before Plunkett was executed at dawn on 4 May for his part in the Easter Rising. It is the song people ask us about most, and the question behind most searches for it — "Grace song true story" — is simple: yes. It happened, and the record of it survives in detail.

Who wrote "Grace"? The song is far younger than the story. It was written in 1985, by Frank O'Meara, who composed the melody, and his brother Seán O'Meara, who wrote the lyrics. Jim McCann's recording reached No. 2 in the Irish charts in 1986 and stayed charted for 33 weeks, and Rod Stewart recorded the song on his 2018 album Blood Red Roses. A ballad written 69 years after the event became the way most people now meet Grace Gifford.

Grace Gifford and Joseph Plunkett: Married in Kilmainham Gaol, 3 May 1916

The wedding was not arranged in the shadow of the execution. Plunkett and Gifford were due to marry on Easter Sunday 1916 — the day the Rising began. Grace, a Protestant-born artist and cartoonist, had converted to Catholicism in April 1916. Plunkett, a poet and one of the Rising's planners, was already seriously ill with tuberculosis and had just undergone surgery on his neck. The Rising, the surrender and the court-martial replaced the wedding day.

What they got instead was the gaol chapel, just before midnight on 3 May, married by Fr Eugene McCarthy of St James's parish. On the marriage certificate, Joseph is listed as a "gentleman" and Grace as an "artist." The only witnesses were two British soldiers. She was taken out of the gaol a widow in everything but the final fact, and at dawn on 4 May Plunkett was shot in the gaol yard. The Rising they married in the middle of is the world of The Rising of the Moon, the older ballad of the same hope.

Historian Davy Holden tells this story plainly and well in The Story of Joe Plunkett and Grace Gifford, and we tell our own short version in our 60-second story of Grace and Joseph.

What Happened to Grace Gifford After 1916?

Grace's life did not end at the chapel door, and it is the half of the story the song cannot hold. She threw herself into republican work through her art — designing posters and cartoons for the movement — and was elected to the Sinn Féin executive in 1917. Her sister Muriel, widow of the executed Thomas MacDonagh, drowned that same year, in 1917. When the Treaty split the movement, Grace opposed it.

In February 1923, during the Civil War, Grace Gifford was arrested and imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol — the same building where she had married Joseph seven years earlier, this time in a cell of her own. There she painted a Madonna and Child on her cell wall, the painting now known as the Kilmainham Madonna; a reproduction of it can still be seen by visitors to the gaol today. Davy Holden has filmed in that cell — his Short on Grace Gifford's prison cell in Kilmainham Gaol is the companion piece to this part of her story.

She was released in May 1923. She never remarried, lived on her art, and died in 1955. The ballad her life inspired now travels where she never did — History Ireland notes that it "is heard from the terraces of Celtic Park" in Glasgow, sung by supporters whose grandparents' generation carried these songs across the water. It belongs with the blog's other prison-and-loss ballads written long after their events: Back Home in Derry and Sean South of Garryowen.

One current note: the chalice and altar vessels used at the 1916 wedding have been lent to the OPW and are going on public display in Kilmainham Gaol Museum's "Last Words" section, as announced in September 2026 — the newest chapter in a story that is still being added to.

To read more: Kilmainham Tales' Grace Gifford page has the wedding certificate details and her own 1949 witness statement. Wikipedia's Grace (Jim McCann song) covers the song itself — 1985, the McCann single, the Stewart recording. History Ireland's Hearts Ne'er Waver tells Grace's story among the women prisoners of the Civil War.

— 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).

"The Night That Pat Murphy Died" — the song is also sung as "Paddy Murphy" — is a Newfoundland song about an Irish wake. Murphy is dead, laid out in the house, and his friends spend the night drinking beside the corpse, playing tricks, and making sure the widow cannot tell what time it is. It is sung as a comedy, and nearly everything in it is a record of what people actually did at wakes.

The song's route is the Irish diaspora in one line: an Irish custom, carried to Newfoundland by emigrants who left before the Great Famine, kept there for generations, and recorded in New York in 1926 by Irish-American immigrants.

A Newfoundland Song About an Irish Wake

The song is often attributed to Johnny Burke (1851–1930), a St. John's songwriter known as the Bard of Prescott Street. No record has been found of Burke writing it, so it is best treated as traditional — a song Newfoundland made its own, whoever first put Murphy's name in it.

Newfoundland's Irish connection is old and deep. Irish emigration there began with the seasonal fishery and became settled emigration from Waterford and the adjoining counties in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. By the 1836 census, half of Newfoundland's population was of Irish birth or descent, and Irish tradition stayed strongest on the Avalon Peninsula. Newfoundland's Irish name is Talamh an Éisc — "the land of the fish."

What Actually Happened at a Wake: Games, Drink and the Corpse in the Room

The song is a catalogue of wake behaviour. Drink is passed all night. Games and tricks go on in the room with the corpse. The whiskey bottle is put on the corpse to keep it cold. The ice is taken off the corpse and put on the beer. The clock is stopped so nobody can tell the time.

Wake games of exactly this kind are recorded in the National Folklore Collection's Schools' Collection: one account, from Castlecoote, County Roscommon, describes young men taking over the kitchen with games while the women kept watch in the room where the corpse was laid out.

One qualification explains the song's tone. The "merry wake" was for an older person whose death was expected. A young or sudden death was waked solemnly, with keening. Murphy's wake is a party because, by the custom's own rules, it was allowed to be one.

How the Wake Crossed the Atlantic Before the Famine

Because Newfoundland's Irish arrived mainly before the Great Famine and the outports stayed isolated, Irish music and custom survived there in early forms. Settlers formed enclaves — St. John's, the Southern Shore, the Cape Shore — some of which stayed almost entirely south-eastern Irish into the 20th century, still singing songs that named places in Ireland.

Our post on American Wake is this song's mirror image: a party the night before someone leaves for America, treated as a funeral because they would not be seen again. Murphy's song is the party the night after someone dies. Body of an American shows the same custom still working in America, at the wake of a boxer, and Fiddler's Green is the gentler version of the same refusal to let death end the night.

Recorded in New York in 1926 by Irish-American Immigrants

The Flanagan Brothers recorded the song on 25 October 1926 in New York, for the Victor label; the session is catalogued in the Discography of American Historical Recordings. Irish-American immigrants, recording a Newfoundland song about an Irish custom, in New York, in 1926 — the whole chain of the diaspora sits inside one record date.

Inside Irish Music's video Newfoundland: The Only Place Pre-Famine Irish Music Still Exists? makes the case for the place this song comes from. The Irish Traditional Music Archive's A Grand Time: The Irish of Newfoundland covers the south-eastern Irish settlements and their songs, Memorial University Libraries' Irish Studies collection documents the Waterford migration and the 1836 census, and the wake games are in the National Folklore Collection at Dúchas.

— hear us play it live (video above).

Ask a sailor where a sailor goes when he dies, and for two hundred years the answer has been Fiddler's Green: a place of perpetual mirth, where the fiddle never stops playing, the dancers never tire, and nobody ever has to ship out again. It is the sea's version of heaven, built by men whose working lives were cold, wet and dangerous, and it sounds exactly like the shore leave they dreamed about.

The song "Fiddler's Green" carries that idea into the folk repertoire. What surprises most people is its age — or rather, its lack of one.

What Is Fiddler's Green? The Sailors' Heaven Explained

The idea itself is old, even if its origins are obscure. The sailors'-paradise Fiddler's Green is documented in print by the mid-1800s — the Houston Folk Music archive cites Frederick Marryat's 1856 novel The Dog Fiend — and the name appears to come from shore, not sea. Before it was heaven, "Fiddler's Green" was also a name for the dockland districts sailors frequented on leave: the streets of taverns, music and dancing around a port. The imagination did the rest, turning the best night ashore into the afterlife itself.

That double meaning is the whole idea in one phrase. A sailor's heaven was never going to be clouds and harps. It was going to be the dockside pub, made permanent.

Written in 1966: The “Traditional” Song That Isn't

The song was written in 1966 by John Conolly, a singer from Grimsby, England. It is so often taken for a traditional song that Conolly has had to reclaim his own royalties on it — folk discographer Mainly Norfolk calls it exactly that, and lists early recordings by Tim Hart and Maddy Prior in 1969 and by the Clancy Brothers with Louis Killen in 1972. The Dubliners carried it too, and through the Clancys and the Dubliners it settled into the Irish repertoire, where it has lived ever since as if it had always been there.

It belongs on the sea-songs shelf of this blog, alongside our shanty pair Haul Away Joe and Leave Her Johnny, and the question every pub crowd knows, Drunken Sailor. Those are working songs. Fiddler's Green is the retirement plan.

From Irish Troopers to the US Cavalry

Fiddler's Green also marched inland. The Cavalrymen's Poem — the "Fiddlers' Green" verses recited in the United States Cavalry — was first published in the US Army's Cavalry Journal in 1923, from a story attributed to Captain "Sammy" Pearson, telling it around a campfire in Wyoming's Medicine Bow Mountains. It remains a US Cavalry tradition, kept today by associations including the 1st Cavalry Division Association: half a world from the sea, troopers took the sailors' paradise and made it their own.

The Irish thread runs straight through that cavalry tradition. The 7th US Cavalry, many of whose troopers were Irish-born, marched to the tune "Garryowen" — from Garraí Eóin, Owen's Garden, a place in Limerick — which reached them by way of the 5th Royal Irish Lancers. An Irish place-name, carried to the American frontier by Irish soldiers, ended up as one of the most famous march tunes in US Army history. That Garryowen is the same Limerick district in our post on Sean South of Garryowen.

So an English songwriter's 1966 song about a sailors' heaven travelled through Irish singers, Irish troopers and American cavalrymen — and came back into Irish pubs, where we sing it now.

To read more: Mainly Norfolk's Fiddlers' Green page

 is the standard folk discography for the song, with its recording history. The 14th Cavalry Association publishes he full text of the Cavalrymen's Poem.

— 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).