"Ride On" is a modern Irish song with a named writer and a plain subject: one person rides away, and the other stays behind. Jimmy MacCarthy of Macroom, County Cork wrote it, Christy Moore recorded it as the title track of his 1984 album Ride On, and it has been sung in Irish pubs and sessions ever since.

It sounds like an old ballad, but it is not. It is a written song by a working songwriter, and MacCarthy has explained in his own words what it is about — parting, emigration, and a parting caused by violence. That explanation is what puts the song inside the Irish story this blog follows: people leaving, and the people left watching them go.

Jimmy MacCarthy: the Singing Horseman from Macroom

MacCarthy grew up in Macroom, County Cork, and before songwriting he worked with horses, as an apprentice jockey and trainer. He has said the phrase "ride on" stayed with him from the training yard, where jockeys shouted it as younger horses came up behind the older ones.

So the horse in the song is real, but it is the source of the phrase, not the subject of the song. People searching for what "Ride On" means often ask whether it is about a horse. The short answer is no. The title came out of the yard. The song itself is about two people.

Christy Moore's 1984 Title Track

Christy Moore recorded "Ride On" as the title track of his 1984 album Ride On, and that recording is the one that carried the song to a wide audience. Mary Coughlan had a hit with her version three years later, in 1987, on her album Under the Influence.

Moore's reading of the song, given to Hot Press, was of two lovers: one politically driven, the other unable to follow. That reading matches what the writer himself says, and it is why the song sits comfortably in a set that also includes older songs of parting and exile.

"One Has a Gun": What MacCarthy Says Ride On Is About

MacCarthy described the song to the Independent as being "about parting and the angst and the deep, gut-wrenching aspect of losing somebody or somebody leaving you or emigrating." He went further: it is about "two people choosing separate paths, because one has a gun and the other can't go along because he doesn't believe in bloodshed." The lyric carries the same line: "I could never go with you / No matter how I wanted to."

That is a specific Irish situation, stated plainly. One person commits to a path that involves violence; the other loves them and will not follow. No goodbye scene resolves it. The rider goes, the watcher stays, and the song ends there.

A Song About Emigrating and Being Left Behind

MacCarthy's own word for the song's subject is emigrating, which connects it to the older parting songs in our set. Leaving of Liverpool is a farewell at the dock, sung by the one who is going. "Ride On" is the same moment from the other side — the view of the one who stays.

It also belongs beside Grace, where a woman is left behind because the man she loves has chosen a course that will kill him, and beside Raglan Road, another parting song built by a Dublin writer. The settings differ. The structure is the same: love on one side, a road on the other.

For more, the Great Irish Songbook's entry on Ride On collects MacCarthy's and Moore's own accounts of the song, and The Originals database traces its writer credit and cover history.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Auld Lang Syne" is a Scottish song, and it is on this blog for a reason that fits the rest of our set: it is a farewell song that emigrants carried around the world. Scots took it with them when they left in the 19th century, the Irish and English who travelled alongside them picked it up, and it ended up sung at partings and at midnight on New Year's Eve from New York to Sydney.

We close the year with it. Most people singing it know the tune and the first few words and not much more.

Burns Wrote It Down in 1788 — He Didn't Invent It

In 1788, Robert Burns sent the words of “Auld Lang Syne” to the Scots Musical Museum. He was clear that he had not written them from nothing. In his own words, it was “an old song, of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript, until I took it down.”

Burns took the song down from oral tradition — from people singing it — and polished and adapted what he heard, as he did with a great deal of the Scots song he collected. The words were printed in the Scots Musical Museum in 1796, after his death.

That makes the song a collected folk song before it is a poem by a famous man. Burns gave it a fixed text and his name's weight, which is a large part of why it survived — but he would have been the first to say the song was old when he found it.

The Tune Arrived Eleven Years Later (1799)

The words and the famous melody did not start out together. The 1796 printing used a different tune.

The melody everyone knows today is a Scots folk tune, related to one William Shield used in his opera Rosina in 1782. It was only paired with Burns's words in George Thomson's compilation in 1799 — eleven years after Burns sent the words in, and three years after he died.

So the song the world sings at midnight is a combination nobody planned: words collected from oral tradition in 1788, fitted in 1799 to a folk melody that was already doing other work.

“Old Long Since”: The Words Translated

"Auld lang syne" translates loosely as "old long since" — for the sake of old times. The song is a series of questions and a toast. Should old acquaintances be forgotten? No. The singer and his old friend have run about the hills and wandered far since they were young, and since then, in the song's image, broad seas have roared between them. The chorus answers with a cup of kindness, raised for auld lang syne.

Underneath the ceremony, it is an emigrant's kind of song: it assumes the people singing it have been scattered, and that the friendship it celebrates is one distance has already tested. That is why it works at partings and at the turning of the year. Our other Scottish song, Caledonia, is about the pull of home; this one is about holding on to people once you have left.

Hogmanay, Emigrants and Guy Lombardo: How It Took Over New Year's Eve

In the 19th century the song became part of Hogmanay, the Scottish New Year, sung standing in a circle holding hands. As Scots emigrated around the world in the 19th century, they took the song with them — Ellisland Farm, where Burns wrote it down, describes it plainly as a song “carried around the world by Scots emigrating in the 19th century.”

Its grip on the North American New Year came later, and one man did most of the fixing. Guy Lombardo was a Canadian-born bandleader whose New Year's Eve broadcasts began on 31 December 1929 and ran for more than thirty years, on radio and then television. Year after year of Lombardo playing it at midnight tied the song to that moment in the American calendar.

A farewell sung in a circle in Scotland, carried abroad by the people leaving it, then beamed into living rooms every December 31st — that is the whole journey. It pairs naturally with American Wake: one tradition waked its leavers the night before they sailed; the other gave them a song to sing to each other once they had gone.

Two good places to go further: Encyclopaedia Britannica's article on “Auld Lang Syne” for the history in short form, and the National Trust for Scotland's page, which gives the full lyric with a glossary of the Scots words — useful if you want to sing more than the first verse this year.

— hear us play it live (video above).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liverpool: The Port a Million Irish Left From

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

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

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

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Leave Her Johnny" is a sea shanty with a rule attached to it: you could only sing it at the very end of the voyage. "Leave her" means leave the ship — to walk ashore in port and be done with her. The song is the crew's farewell, and its verses are where sailors finally said what they actually thought of the ship, the food, and the officers.

It is a call-and-response work song like the other shanties in our set, including Drunken Sailor. But this one was saved for a single job, on a single day, and singing it at any other time could get a man in serious trouble.

The Last Shanty of the Voyage

"Leave Her Johnny" was a pump shanty, sung while working the pumps — and specifically reserved for the last spell of pumping after the ship was tied up in port. Joanna Colcord, in Roll and Go, described it as "the sailor's farewell song, in which he expressed without fear — since the voyage was over — his opinion of ship and officers."

That "without fear" is the key to the whole song. The verses complain: about the food, the work, the officers, the ship herself. At sea, a crew depended on those officers for its safety and its rations, and complaints had consequences. Tied up in port, with the articles nearly run out, the men could finally say it all out loud — and they sang it while they did the last pumping the ship would ask of them.

Why Singing It Early Was Almost Mutiny

Because the song was a list of grievances, timing was everything. The shanty writer Frank T. Bullen warned that to sing "Leave Her Johnny" before the last day or so of the voyage was "almost tantamount to mutiny."

That is not a figure of speech. A song that rehearses everything wrong with a ship, sung by the whole crew in rhythm while they work, is one step from a refusal to work — and everyone aboard knew it. So the song stayed in its box for the whole voyage, however long that was, and came out only when the port was made and the pumping was nearly done. Different jobs at sea had different songs, and the contrast is easy to hear: Haul Away Joe is a halyard shanty, sung to haul sails up; this one is a pump shanty, sung at the end of everything.

Born on the Emigrant Packets?

Stan Hugill, the last of the professional shantymen and the great collector of the tradition, believed "Leave Her Johnny" probably originated around the time of the Great Famine in the 1840s and was first sung aboard the Western Ocean packets — the Liverpool-to-America ships that carried the emigrant traffic across the Atlantic.

The earliest evidence for the song places it in the 1860s, in the recollections of Captain W. B. Whall, published in School and Sea Days in 1901. Hugill printed it in Shanties From the Seven Seas as both a halyard and a pump shanty. If Hugill is right about the packets, then this farewell was sung on the same class of ship that carried Irish emigrants west — the farewell of the crew who made that crossing over and over, paired in our set with Fiddler's Green, the sailor's picture of heaven.

The lyrics in their variants, including the pumping version, and the Colcord, Bullen, and Hugill history in one place, are at Main Sail Cafe, "Leave Her, Johnny".

— hear us play it live (video above).