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

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

Written by a Band the Diaspora Produced

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Old Songs and Old Stories Keep Us Alive"

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

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

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

— hear us play it live (video above).

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Irish Tune Underneath: Óró Sé Do Bheatha 'Bhaile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— hear us play it live (video above).

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

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

Poitín: Banned in 1661, Legal Again in 1997

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaugers, Gougers, and Giving Them the Slip

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

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

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

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

— hear us play it live (video above).

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

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

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

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

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

Patrick Fleming, 1650: The Broadside Behind the Song

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

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

What Jenny Did to His Pistols

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

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

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

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

— hear us play it live (video above).

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

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

Harry Wincott Wrote It in 1893 — and Died Broke

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

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

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

Why Everyone Shouts "MacIntyre!"

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

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

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

How a London Music Hall Song Became a Pub Standard

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

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

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

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

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Nancy Whiskey" is a warning sung like a love song. The singer looks back on seven years spent with Nancy, and by the end his money is gone, his trade is gone, and his health is going with them. Nancy is not a woman he met in a pub. Nancy is the whiskey itself, given a woman's name and a woman's hold over him. People searching for the Nancy Whiskey meaning land on the same answer: this is a drinker talking about drink as if it were the great love of his life, because in his life it was.

The song is Scottish, and it has a second name that tells you more about it than the famous one does. In the folk record it is also "The Calton Weaver," Roud 883, and its singer is not a vague young man. He is a working man with a trade, in a named place, telling you exactly what the drink cost him.

A Glasgow Weaver Ruined by Drink: The Calton Weaver

The Calton is a district of Glasgow long tied to handloom weaving, and the song's narrator introduces himself by his job: he is a weaver, a Calton weaver. His warning is just as direct. Beware of whiskey, Nancy Whiskey — she will ruin you as she ruined him.

That setting matters. A handloom weaver was paid for finished work, worked long hours at the loom, and felt every lost day in his pocket. A drinking habit was not an abstract vice for a man like that. It took the rent, the food, and eventually the ability to work at all. The song does not preach about alcohol in general. It follows one skilled worker as the money runs out, and it lets him do the talking.

It also explains the song's shape. A weaver warning other weavers had a reason to make his story singable. The chorus is easy to pick up, the tune carries a room, and the warning lands harder because it is wrapped in affection. He still sings Nancy's name like he loves her. That is what makes the song honest instead of a lecture.

How Nancy Whiskey Got to Derry and Hartford

Songs like this one stayed alive because singers carried them, and the folk record names some of the carriers. In Ireland, Eddie Butcher of Magilligan, County Derry, sang a version called "Nancy's Whiskey." It was recorded by the collector Hugh Shields in July 1966. So the song was not only printed in books about Scottish tradition. It was sung, from memory, by a singer in County Derry well into the twentieth century.

It crossed the Atlantic the same way, in singers' repertoires. The Clancy Brothers, with Louis Killen, sang "Nancy Whiskey" live at the Bushnell Auditorium in Hartford, Connecticut, on St. Patrick's Day, 17 March 1972. That performance was released on their album Live on St. Patrick's Day. A Glasgow weaver's warning, sung by an Irish group in Connecticut on the biggest Irish night of the American year — that is the diaspora story in one booking. The song went where Irish and Scottish singers went, and American audiences heard their own drinking stories in it.

One more carrier: the Scottish folk singer Nancy Whiskey took her stage name from this song's chorus — a singer could name herself after it and audiences knew the reference.

What "Nancy Whiskey" Means: A Warning Sung Like a Love Song

Read the song as a pair with the other whiskey songs in this blog and its place gets clearer. Rare Old Mountain Dew is about the drink itself — where poitín comes from and the men who made it. "Nancy Whiskey" is about the drinker. Streams of Whiskey personifies drink again, in Brendan Behan's dreaming. Moonshiner tells the ruined-drinker story from America. And Dublin Whiskey Fire is what happens when a whole city's whiskey goes up at once.

The closest relatives are the temperance pair the band already sings. Whiskey You're the Devil addresses the drink directly, half in love and half in warning, and Wild Rover is the prodigal who finally gives the drink up. Nancy's weaver never gets that far. He ends the song where he started it — still able to name exactly what ruined him, which is not the same as escaping it.

That is why pubs keep the song. It is a good tune, a strong chorus, and a working man's account of the bill coming due, told by the man himself.

For the full folk record — the Roud number, the collected versions, Eddie Butcher's Derry singing, and the Clancy Brothers' Hartford recording — the best single page is Mainly Norfolk's Nancy Whisky / The Calton Weaver.

— hear us play it live (video above).

It is the song where the whole pub claps — four claps, on "no, nay, never." Audiences ask for it by that description. Which makes its real nature funnier and better: "Wild Rover" is a temperance song, written to warn men off drink, and it is not Irish in origin at all.

Both of those facts are the story. The song became a pub anthem, and became Irish, by being sung — in pubs, by Irish people and the diaspora, until nobody remembered it had ever been anything else.

Not Irish, Not a Drinking Song: Lanfiere's Broadside, c. 1678

Brian Peters traced the song's history in Folk Music Journal (vol. 10, 2015). It goes back to a 17th-century English broadside by Thomas Lanfiere, The Good Fellow's Resolution; or, The Bad Husband's Return From His Folly, first printed around 1678–80. From there it passed into oral tradition in England, Scotland, Ireland, and North America, and became popular in Australia.

The temperance reading has standing behind it too: Professor T. M. Devine, in The Scottish Nation 1700–2000, describes it as a temperance song. It was printed in The American Songster in the US in 1845 and spread from Scotland to America with the temperance movement — a song against drink, distributed by the organised campaign against drink. "No nay never" is a vow: no, nay, never, no more.

The Landlady, the Gold, and the Refused Pint: The Story in the Song

The story the song tells is a small scene, and it deserves telling straight. A man who has roved for years comes home with money in his pocket and goes to the alehouse where he used to drink. He asks his old landlady for credit — and she refuses him. He owes, or he's a stranger now; either way, no.

Then he puts his gold on the table, and the room changes. The landlady who would not pour for him on trust is suddenly all welcome. His answer is the song: he has seen what the welcome was worth, he will play the wild rover no more, and he will go home and settle. The moral is not subtle — the welcome was never for him, it was for the gold — and the vow at the end is the temperance broadside doing its work.

His natural partner on this blog is the rover in All For Me Grog, who spent everything on drink and came home with nothing: one rover swears off, the other just runs out. And Whiskey You're the Devil is the temperance pair from the other side — the drinker who never swears off at all.

How the Diaspora Made It Irish (Second National Anthem Included)

Here is what happened to Lanfiere's broadside. It has been dubbed the "second national anthem of Ireland." It is a Glasgow Celtic terrace chant. It lives in rugby songbooks. Irish pubs close with it from Dublin to Sydney, and it was sung in emigrant gatherings wherever the Irish landed — the world of Thousands Are Sailing. Inside Irish Music makes the same argument in Ireland's Most Famous Drinking Song Wasn't Irish… Or a Drinking Song: what makes it Irish is the people who sing it.

That is not a demotion. It is how folk music works. Ireland did not write this song; Ireland adopted it so completely that the adoption became the fact about it. Here are the famous four claps, in a Short from Samuel Beckett's.

The Country Dance & Song Society's Song of the Month page carries Brian Peters' introduction and a Hampshire-collected version with the older temperance chorus, and Mainly Norfolk's Wild Rover page tracks the recorded versions, including Lankum's Drogheda-sourced rewrite.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"All For Me Grog" is a sailors' song that Irish singers made their own. The singer has come ashore with money in his pocket and spent the lot — on grog, on tobacco, and on women — until his boots, his shirt, and nearly everything else he owns are gone. It is sung fast and loud, with a chorus a whole room can pick up after one hearing.

That is part of why the song lasts. It belongs to the same working sea world as  Drunken Sailor and Haul Away Joe: men paid off at the end of a voyage, ashore for a short time, and due back on a ship whether they were ready or not.

What Was Grog? Admiral Vernon and the Navy Rum Ration

Grog was not a general word for drink. It was a specific drink with a specific history: the Royal Navy's rum ration, watered down.

In 1740, Admiral Edward Vernon ordered the navy's rum to be diluted, at about four parts water to one part rum, and served in two portions across the day. Vernon was nicknamed "Old Grog" because of the grogram cloak he wore, and the watered drink took his nickname. What started as one admiral's order became a daily fixture of life at sea for more than two centuries.

The rum tot lasted until 31 July 1970 — a date sailors still call Black Tot Day, when the Royal Navy issued the ration for the last time. So when the singer in this song says all his money went for grog, he is talking about the drink that structured a sailor's day: measured out by the navy, looked forward to, and missed when it was gone.

A Sailor Sells His Boots, His Shirt and His Wife

It has been sung under titles such as "Good Brown Ale and Tobacco," and George Gardiner collected a version in 1906 titled "The Nobby Hat" Regardless of the title and changes to the verses, the song describes an ongoing cycle of a sailor being paid off, proceeding to spend his entire earnings and then some on grog and tobacco. When his wages come up short, he parts ways with different articles of clothing and even his wife. Once his bed is gone his only option is to ship out "across the western ocean" to earn another wage that he will predictably squander in the exact same manner.

This repetitive cycle forms the heart of the song. While lively singing and a boisterous chorus give it a comical air, the underlying reality is grim: a laborer whose pay never survived his leave, bound to a life at sea because no other livelihood awaited him ashore.

There is a useful contrast with Wild Rover, the temperance song that pubs turned into an anthem. The Wild Rover repents and goes home to ask forgiveness. The singer of "All For Me Grog" never repents at all. He counts what he has lost, laughs about it in the chorus, and gets back on the ship.

Across the Western Plains: The Song's Australian Life

Folk tunes traveled right alongside the working men who sang them, sometimes across vast distances. When "All For Me Grog" reached Australia, shearers and bush workers adapted the song to reflect their surroundings. They replaced the sailor's "western ocean" with the "western plains," giving birth to the bush song "Across the Western Plains".

This single-word adjustment highlights how these folk songs endured. Rather than being preserved in print, they lived in the memory of laborers who brought them to new lands and tailored the lyrics to fit their daily toil. The shift from a navy rum chant to a shearing shed song worked seamlessly because the fundamental pattern of existence remained identical: strenuous labor, a quick payday blowout, and a return to the grind.

The song achieved broad popularity in Ireland after The Dubliners issued it as a single in 1967, driving the track to No. 10 on the national charts. Within a live performance, it complements other nautical farewells and hard-luck tales such as Leave Her Johnny and Fiddler's Green.

It sits naturally in a set alongside the other farewells and hard-luck songs of shipboard life, Leave Her Johnny and Fiddler's Green.

To learn more about the history of the song, Mainly Norfolk's page on “Good Brown Ale and Tobacco / All for Me Grog” is the best place to dig.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Drinking in the Day" is a walk across Dublin with a girl, a bright November day, and a conclusion the singer states outright at the end: spend your youth on poetry, spend your cash at play, because the best spent youth is the one you throw away.

The band singing it is not from Dublin. The Tossers are from Chicago — Irish-Americans writing Ireland from the other side of the Atlantic. That double view, a Dublin street scene in a Chicago band's song, is exactly the kind of thing this blog exists to point at.

The Tossers: Irish Chicago, Singing Dublin

The Tossers formed in 1993 in Chicago's Irish South Side scene and have been at it ever since, led by singer Tony Duggins. They are one of the longest-running bands in Irish-American punk — the Celtic-punk line that runs from the Pogues in London to bands like the Tossers in Chicago, each city putting its own Irish stamp on the same idea.

Duggins has described the band's work as the story of the Irish coming to America. "Drinking in the Day" flips that direction: an Irish-American band looking back across the water and setting its song entirely on Dublin ground.

We pair it in our set with Body of an American, the Pogues' wake song. London-Irish and Chicago-Irish, one generation of songwriters apart, writing about the same two places from opposite ends of the crossing.

St Stephen's Green to Ormond Quay: The Walk in the Song

The song is on The Tossers' album The Valley of the Shadow of Death (2005), and its geography is specific. A girl asks the singer to go walking in Saint Stephen's Green, Dublin's great city-centre park. The walk carries them across the city to Ormond Quay, on the north bank of the Liffey, on what the song calls that bright November day.

That is the whole action: a walk, a girl, a fine day in the city. There is no plot twist and no disaster coming. The song's pleasure is in the walk itself — two young people spending a day on each other instead of on anything sensible, in a city rendered closely enough that anyone who knows Dublin can trace their route.

One contemporary reviewer heard more in it than a stroll. A Daily Herald review of the band at the time read the song as a double-meaning romance in which Duggins pays tribute to Ronnie Drew of The Dubliners — the great Dublin voice hanging over a Chicago band's Dublin song, which is a fair picture of how Irish-American musicians have always worked: the old country's singers looking over their shoulders, whether they asked for it or not.

What the Song Lands On: Poetry, Cash and a Youth Thrown Away

The ending is the song's argument, stated plainly. Spend your youth on poetry, the singer concludes, and spend your cash at play — because the best spent youth is the one you throw away.

That is not a drunk's excuse dressed up as wisdom, and it is not a warning about drinking either. It is a straight statement of the trade the song has been showing you for three minutes: the hours spent walking a girl across Dublin on a bright November day are gone for good, and the song counts them as the best hours there are. Youth spent carefully, saved up against the future, is the only kind the song calls wasted.

Our other song on this shelf argues the opposite side of the same question. Going Out For One is about the man who never gets home at all. The Tossers' singer regrets nothing and says so. Between the two of them, a set — and a drinker's life — is pretty well covered.

Want to read more? PopMatters' review of The Valley of the Shadow of Death places this song in the Tossers' catalogue, and the full lyrics are there to check the walk, and the verdict, for yourself.

— 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).

On the evening of 18 June 1875, fire broke out in Laurence Malone's bonded warehouse on Ardee Street, in the Liberties district of Dublin. The warehouse held about 5,000 hogsheads of whiskey, with Reid's malt house next door. When the casks burst, the whiskey did not just burn where it stood — it ran. A stream of burning liquor, about six inches deep, flowed through the streets as far as the Coombe, and houses on Cork Street, Ardee Street, Chamber Street and Mill Street were destroyed before the night was out.

This is a true story from Dublin's working-class history, and it is the story behind our song "Dublin Whiskey Fire," which we wrote with our friend Chris Pappas. In 1875 the Liberties was the centre of the world's whiskey trade, and the people who lived in its tenements lived on top of it.

The Night Dublin's Streets Ran With Burning Whiskey (18 June 1875)

The alarm, in part, came from the animals. Panicked pigs and livestock in the yards around the warehouse made enough noise to wake the neighbourhood, and people got out of the houses ahead of the flames. Nobody died in the fire itself.

What killed people was the whiskey. With a river of it running down the gutter for the taking, locals scooped it up in whatever they had — hats, pots, porringers, even boots — and drank it on the spot. This was undiluted cask-strength spirit, straight out of the burning warehouse, and it was poison at that strength. Thirteen people died of alcohol poisoning. Not one of the thirteen was killed by the flames. In total, over five acres of the city burned.

Fire stories run through Irish song — our post on Old Dun Cow  tells the other famous one, a pub fire in a song. The Dublin fire was not a song first. It happened, on a real street, to real people.

Stopping a River of Fire With Manure

The detail everyone remembers from that night is how the fire was stopped. Water was worse than useless on burning whiskey: it would have floated the spirit on top and carried the fire further through the streets. Captain James Robert Ingram of the Dublin Fire Brigade understood that, and his men dammed the flow instead — first with sand and gravel, and then with cartloads of horse manure brought in from the city's depots. The manure soaked up the whiskey, smothered the stream, and killed the flames.

It is the kind of practical, unglamorous thinking that working cities run on, and it worked. We tell the short version of this story in our song-story Short, Dublin Whiskey Fire: Pigs, Shoes, and The Fire Brigade.

The Liberties: Dublin's Golden Triangle

To understand how one warehouse fire could flood a district, you have to know what the Liberties was in 1875. By the turn of the 19th century Dublin had 37 distilleries, and six of them stood in the Liberties, in the area known as the Golden Triangle. George Roe's distillery covered 17 acres and was the largest in the world. By 1887, Irish distillers held about 70 percent of the global whiskey market.

That wealth sat in the middle of one of the poorest districts in the city. The tenements of the Liberties housed the families who worked in the distilleries, breweries and tanneries, and when the whiskey ran burning past their doors, it was their homes that stood in its path. Dublin and whiskey belong together in this blog — see also Streams of Whiskey, Brendan Behan's Dublin as the Pogues sang it, and Whiskey in the Jar, the oldest whiskey song in our set.

Why We Wrote a Song About the Dublin Whiskey Fire

Most of the songs we play are traditional, but this one is ours. We asked Chris Pappas to help us write it because the 1875 fire is exactly the kind of Dublin story that deserves a song: a disaster nobody famous died in, in a poor district, stopped by a fire captain with carts of manure. The great events of Irish history get the ballads. The Liberties deserved one too.

To dig deeper: Visit Dublin's official guide tells the history of whiskey in Dublin, from the Golden Triangle to the fire itself. Wikipedia's Dublin whiskey fire page has the full timeline and the damage figures. Wine Enthusiast's How a Fire Forever Changed Irish Whiskey

 covers what the fire meant for the trade that followed.

— hear us play it live (video above).

Everybody who has ever stood in an Irish pub knows how this song ends before it starts. "Going Out For One" is Gearoid McCarthy's song about the oldest promise in Irish social life: out for one pint, just the one — and what actually happens next. The one becomes two, the two become a session, and the night takes on a life of its own.

McCarthy is a young singer from Foynes, Co. Limerick, and this is a new song — most of our set is a century old or more. It earned its place the way songs always have: people heard it, recognised their own Friday night in it, and passed it on. It has travelled further and faster than most songs in this blog ever did.

What "Going Out For One" Is About: The Pint That Becomes the Night

The song works because the ritual it describes is real. The pub in Ireland is not just a place that sells drink; it is where the week's news gets traded, where music happens, where people who meant to go home early are kept by the company. We make that case at length in our post on Irish Pub Song — this song is a modern verse of the same argument, written from inside the ritual instead of about it.

The humour is in the gap between the intention and the outcome, and McCarthy sings it straight, which is why it lands. Our set has one other song built on the same small decision made early in the day: Drinking in the Day, a toast to short-term pleasure. Between the two of them, the whole philosophy is covered.

McCarthy's grounding in the tradition is the real thing. He is from Foynes, in Co. Limerick, learned the songs at home from his father, and won All-Ireland Fleadh Cheoil singing titles before he reached national audiences with Mad For Road on RTÉ's talent shows. The new song comes out of the old school: a singer raised on the repertoire, writing about the room the repertoire is sung in.

From Foynes to Newfoundland: How the Song Travelled

The distance this song has covered is a diaspora story in itself. In McCarthy's own words, the song "has taken me on an Irish Tour and Newfoundland tour and it's got over 10 million views and I get videos of musicians covering it all over the world." A song about a Limerick man's one pint is now sung by musicians on other continents who have never been to Foynes — because the ritual it describes exists wherever Irish people gather.

Newfoundland deserves its sentence. Tim Pat Coogan called it "the most Irish place in the world outside Ireland": the island was settled heavily from Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny, Tipperary and Cork, and Irish accents and Irish music survived there with a strength that surprises visitors from Ireland itself. A Foynes song touring Newfoundland is not a song travelling somewhere foreign. It is a song going to visit relatives.

That is why this post sits comfortably in a blog of old ballads. The songs in our set travelled by ship, in emigrants' memories, over decades. McCarthy's travelled by phone, in weeks — but it travelled the same roads, to the same people, for the same reason. Somebody is always going out for one.

To hear McCarthy in his own words — on the song, the singing and Newfoundland — listen to episode 118 of The Ireland Podcast. Tintean's Newfoundland and Irish History explains the island's Irish roots. And MNPR Magazine profiled the song and its writer here.

— 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).

"Don't Go for the One" is a pub joke set to music, and it makes no apology for it. A man is sent on a simple errand — buy snails, get home on time — and gives himself the worst advice a drinker can give: he'll just go for the one.

The song was written by Steve Twigger and Patrick Murphy of Gaelic Storm. It is not a traditional song handed down from anywhere; it is a crafted piece of comic songwriting by a working Irish-American band, and it works in a set the way a good joke works in a pub — timing, a familiar weakness, and a man walking straight into trouble he saw coming.

The Story: Harvey, a Bag of Snails and One Drink

Harvey's sister has married a Frenchman, and the family wants to make him feel at home. Harvey is sent out to buy snails for the meal. It is the kind of errand that takes twenty minutes if a man goes straight there and straight back.

Harvey does not go straight back. He meets his mate, and the two of them settle the matter the way the title warns against: just the one drink. One drink becomes the evening. The evening becomes the night. Harvey knows, the whole time, what is waiting for him at home — a wife, a family dinner, and a French brother-in-law expecting snails.

By the time Harvey finally heads for home, it is twenty past ten, he has been drinking all night, and he is clutching the bag of snails. Running down his own path, he trips, and the snails go everywhere. His wife kicks open the door and demands an excuse — and tells him it had better be good. Harvey looks down at the snails spread across the ground and, with a confident air, says to them: "Five more feet, lads — we're nearly there." As if he and the snails have been crawling home together all evening, and the snails are the reason he's late.

Its natural partner in our set is Going Out For One, the other song built on the same honest lie. Every pub tradition has these songs, because every pub has these men.

From Bring Yer Wellies (2006): A Pub Joke Set to Music

The song appears as track 12 of Gaelic Storm's album Bring Yer Wellies, released in 2006. Naming the album matters, because this blog is quietly full of it. Our closer, Kiss Me I'm Irish, is the album's closing track — two songs on the same record, played by the same band, and neither is traditional. Both are modern Irish-American songwriting doing the job folk songs have always done: giving a crowd something to sing together.

That is worth saying plainly, because it is the real story of a lot of the modern pub repertoire. The tradition did not stop being written. Bands in Irish pubs kept adding songs to it, and the good ones — the ones a room full of strangers can join in on — stayed.

Gaelic Storm: From a Santa Monica Pub to Titanic — and an Annapolis Frontman

Gaelic Storm's own story is the Irish diaspora circuit in one band. They formed in 1996 at O'Brien's Irish Pub in Santa Monica, California, where singer Patrick Murphy — a native of County Cork — was the pub's manager. A Cork man, running an Irish pub in California, started a band in the bar he managed.

A year later, before the band had released an album, James Cameron put them in Titanic (1997) as the steerage party band — the musicians playing for the Irish emigrants dancing below decks in the film's most joyful scene. The band that plays for the emigrants on screen was itself made up of emigrants, playing the music of home on the far side of the Atlantic.

Murphy's own road later ran east. A Bay Weekly profile has him saying he calls Annapolis home, and Gaelic Storm's own tour promotion names Galway Bay in Annapolis as Patrick's favourite Irish pub in the United States. That is a pub on this band's own circuit, in a city we play in. The rung above us on the same ladder, occupied by the band that wrote this song.

We play "Don't Go for the One" because it earns its laughs honestly, and because its writers are part of the same story this blog tells: Irish musicians who left, built working lives in American pubs, and wrote the songs those pubs now sing.

Want to check the record? Wikipedia's Bring Yer Wellies page lists the album's tracks and credits, and Bay Weekly's Patrick Murphy profile tells the story of the Cork singer who made Annapolis his home.

— 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).

"Seven Drunken Nights" is a comic ballad about a drunk husband who comes home night after night, finds evidence that another man has been in his house, and accepts his wife's explanations every time. A horse outside the door is a cow. A coat is a blanket. By the end of the week the explanations have stopped making sense to anyone except him.

The song is much older than The Dubliners' hit version, and it reached them by a route that runs straight through the Irish-language tradition: from a Connemara sean-nós singer who had it in Irish, into a Dublin pub, and out onto the charts in 1967 — where Irish radio would not play it.

Our Goodman: A Ballad Collected in the 1770s

The song is a version of the ballad collectors catalogued as "Our Goodman." A version was collected in Scotland in the 1770s, and a London broadside version, "The Merry Cuckold and the Kind Wife," dates from the 1760s. The joke structure is the song: the same scene repeated, the excuses getting thinner, the husband getting drunker.

It travelled, too. Versions of it moved into American folk and blues tradition, carried in part by Irish-Americans. Like Whiskey in the Jar, it is a song that belongs to several countries at once because the people who sang it kept moving.

Joe Heaney Had It in Irish First

Ronnie Drew said The Dubliners got the song from Joe Heaney — Seosamh Ó hÉanaí, the sean-nós singer from Connemara — in O'Donoghue's pub in Dublin in 1961–62. Heaney had the song in Irish, as "Peigín is Peadar."

Heaney had already sung it in Irish on Radio Éireann and got away with it. The ban, when it came, caught the English version. A song about a wife deceiving her husband was acceptable to the national broadcaster in the Irish language and unacceptable in English, which says a good deal about Ireland in those years, and about who the censors thought was listening.

That is the Irish story inside this drinking song: a pub standard with a chart history started life in the Irish-language tradition, carried by one of the great sean-nós singers.

Banned by RTÉ, Played by Radio Caroline

The Dubliners released the song as a single on St Patrick's Day 1967. RTÉ refused to play it. The pirate station Radio Caroline played it instead, and it reached No. 1 in Ireland and No. 7 in the UK.

It is the same pattern as All For Me Grog and Rare Old Mountain Dew: drink as the excuse for everything, sung by a narrator the audience is laughing at, not with. We usually save it for late in the set — and if it is requested early, we suggest earmuffs for the younger listeners before the weekend arrives.

Why There Are Only Five Nights in the Famous Version

There are seven nights in the song. The Dubliners' recording stops at five, because the last two nights were considered too vulgar to record. Drew used to say it from the stage: "There are seven verses to this song but we're only allowed to sing five of them."

What the husband finds on the last two nights is the point the joke has been building to all week, and it is the part 1967 would not put on a record. The five-night version is the one the world knows, and the missing nights are the reason the song's reputation is dirtier than its famous recording.

The Joe Heaney archive page for this song holds Heaney's own recording and the Drew interview quoted above. Mainly Norfolk's page on Our Goodman is the standard guide to the ballad's many versions.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Katy Daly" is a comic song about a woman who makes whiskey in the mountains, outwits the law that drinks her product, and ends up brewing in heaven. It is a made-up story, written in Ireland around 1960, about an Irish emigrant couple in the American West — and that is what makes it worth singing. It takes Ireland's oldest illegal trade, poitín-making, and sets it down in Tombstone, Arizona.

Katy herself is a character in a song, not a documented person. The story the lyrics tell is the one below.

A Showband Song, Not a True Story

"Come Down From the Mountains, Katie Daly" was written by Irishman Eamonn O'Shea (his real name was Herman Weight) and released on the Waltons label around 1960. Tom Dunphy and The Royal Showband recorded it in 1962, and Dermot O'Brien and The Clubmen had a hit with it in 1964.

That puts the song in the Irish showband era, when dance bands toured Ireland playing a mix of country, ballads, and comic numbers. A novelty song about an Irishwoman running a still in the Wild West fit that world exactly: Ireland's music, America's scenery, and a joke in every verse.

What the Lyrics Actually Say

In the song, Katie's husband — "her old man" — came from Tipperary "in the pioneering year of '42" and was shot in Tombstone City for making Irish mountain dew. Katie carries on the trade herself, up in the mountains, and the law comes for her.

The best verse is the courtroom. The judge sentencing her admits that he, the jury, and the lawyers have all drunk her whiskey themselves. She is jailed anyway, and she dies in prison — but the song does not leave her there. An angel takes her "across the great divide," and St. Peter, who knows good whiskey when he hears about it, sets her to brewing in heaven. Even death does not stop the still.

You can watch a quick take in our Katy Daly Short.

Mountain Dew: Poitín in an American Story

"Irish mountain dew" is poitín — whiskey made in small stills, outside the law, the way it had been made in Ireland for centuries. The song simply moves the still. Instead of a hillside in Tipperary, it sits in the mountains over Tombstone, and instead of the revenue men of Ireland, the law that comes for Katie is American.

That is the Irish-American story in one move. Emigrants carried the trade with them because they carried the taste and the skills with them, and American moonshining and Irish poitín-making are branches of the same tree. Our post on Rare Old Mountain Dew covers the Irish side of that tradition, and Moonshiner covers a song from the American side of the same still-and-the-law world.

Why Katy Was Never at Alcatraz

Versions of Katy's story that circulate online sometimes send her to Alcatraz. The song never mentions it, and the history rules it out: no woman was ever imprisoned at Alcatraz. The National Park Service answers the question directly — the federal penitentiary on the island, which operated from 1934 to 1963, held men only. Katy's prison is the one in the song: a jail cell, a short stay, and a trip to heaven to run the still for St. Peter.

For the song itself — full lyrics, chords, and the O'Shea and showband recording history — see Irish Folk Songs on "Come Down From The Mountains Katie Daly". For the Alcatraz record, the National Park Service's Women on Fort Alcatraz sets out who actually lived and served on the island.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"The Moonshiner" is a song about a man who makes illegal whiskey, drinks it, and asks God to bless the people who make it. Nobody knows for certain where it comes from. The Clancy Brothers claimed it was Irish. The weight of the evidence points the other way — an American song that became more familiar in Ireland than in America. A song that crosses the Atlantic in both directions is the Irish diaspora story in miniature, and this one did it with a still in its luggage.

We sing it alongside Katy Daly, another song from the same world of stills and revenue men.

Irish or American? The Disputed Origin

The song is catalogued as Roud Folk Song Index No. 4301, and its origins are genuinely disputed. On their recording, the Clancy Brothers claimed an Irish origin for it. The evidence leans American: the lyric appears to be an American one that became popular in Ireland sung to a different tune, and the word in it is "moonshine," not "poitín" — the vocabulary of Appalachia, not Ireland.

There is no definitive proof either way, and the honest answer is that the argument itself is the interesting part. Songs moved with people, changed tunes at the dock, and picked up new words in new countries. Pinning a song like this to one birthplace misses how it actually lived.

Delia Murphy and the Clancy Brothers Bring It to Ireland

Whatever its birthplace, the song's Irish life is documented. Delia Murphy was singing "The Moonshiner" in Ireland from the late 1930s and recorded it for His Master's Voice in 1939, released in 1940. Tommy Makem credited Murphy with introducing the song to Irish audiences.

The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem recorded it in 1959, on Come Fill Your Glass with Us. After that, the song became more familiar in Ireland than it was in America — described as a fairly unique "reverse emigration" of a song: the traffic in the folk revival usually ran west, carrying Irish songs to America, and this one ran back loaded the other way.

Bob Dylan recorded "Moonshiner" in 1963, during the sessions for The Times They Are A-Changin' — but his version was not released at the time. It surfaced in 1991 on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3, and the revival that followed, through acts like Uncle Tupelo and Cat Power, dates from then. Dylan's take matters. But the Irish line — Murphy to the Clancys — had carried the song for more than thirty years before his recording ever reached the public.

Poitín and Moonshine: The Same Story in Two Countries

Ireland's poitín tradition and Appalachia's moonshine are the same story in two places: small illegal stills, revenue men to dodge, and songs that side with the maker. Our post on Rare Old Mountain Dew covers the Irish side of that family.

"The Moonshiner" is often sung to a structure very similar to The Wild Rover — the reformed drinker's tune carrying the unrepentant one's words. And it keeps a verse many American performances drop: the blessing, in which the singer asks God to bless the moonshiners. A prayer for the people running the still says, in one line, whose side the song is on. It belongs on the blog's American shelf next to House of the Rising Sun.

The disputed origin, Delia Murphy, the Clancys, and Dylan are all covered with references at Wikipedia, "The Moonshiner", and Wide Open Country lays out how Appalachian and Irish whiskey songs match up.

— 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).

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).