Written in the H-Blocks: Bobby Sands' Poem of Exile

“Back Home in Derry” was written by Bobby Sands, an Irish republican prisoner in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh (the Maze Prison). Sands led the 1981 hunger strike, protesting the British government's refusal to grant political status to republican prisoners, and died on May 5, 1981, after 66 days without food.

The song he wrote is not about his own time, at least not on the surface. Its narrator is a rebel of an earlier Ireland, taken from his home in Derry and shipped in chains to Australia, looking back at the town he will never see again. But nobody who knows where the words were written hears it as only history. A man in a cell in 1980, writing as a transported rebel of 1803, was writing his own situation into the long Irish story of prison and exile. That is the whole song in one move: the cell and the convict ship are the same place, 178 years apart.

1803 Robert Emmet's Rebels Bound for Botany Bay

The narrator sails in the aftermath of the rising of 1803, Robert Emmet's short, doomed rebellion in Dublin. Emmet's execution is in the song, and the men in the hold with the narrator are his rebels, “sixty rebels now bound for Botany Bay.”

Transportation was the British government's answer to rebellion: instead of a grave in Ireland that people could gather at, a convict ship and a one-way journey to the far side of the world. Between 1788 and 1868, roughly 162,000 convicts were transported to Australia, and about a quarter of them were Irish. Sands' sixty rebels were one shipload in a traffic that ran for eighty years — and for the men on it, “home” became a word for somewhere you described to your children but never saw again. Our post on Black Velvet Band tells the same journey from  a different angle: a Belfast girl, a stolen watch, and Van Diemen's Land.

How Christy Moore Heard It in Derry and Put It on Ride On (1984)

Moore was playing in Derry and staying with the Barrett family on Chamberlain Street when a young man, just home from the H-Blocks, sang him the verses and wrote them out for him. The next night, in Bellaghy, Colm Scullion — who had shared a cell with Sands on the blanket protest — sang him another Sands song, “McIlhatton.” Moore put “Back Home in Derry” on his album Ride On (1984), produced by Dónal Lunny, in a version shorter than Sands' original poem. That record is how a lyric written in a prison cell reached the world: carried out in memory and on paper, sung in two houses, and recorded within three years of its author's death.

Moore's page for the song has the full lyric and his account in his own words — it is the best thing on the internet about this song, and it is linked below.

Why a Canadian Shipwreck Song Carries It

If the tune sounds familiar, it should. Moore set Sands' words to the air of Gordon Lightfoot's “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” — Moore himself suspects the air “has earlier origins,” but Lightfoot's shipwreck ballad is the shape everyone knows. We have a whole post on The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and the pairing is not an  accident of convenience: a song about men lost at sea in 1975 carries a song about men shipped over the sea in 1803, and both are about the ones who never came home.

This is one of a small cluster of prison songs in our set. Men Behind the Wire is the internment song of a decade earlier, The Auld Triangle is Mountjoy's, and Grace ends in Kilmainham. Sands knew exactly which shelf of Irish  song he was writing for.

Want to dig deeper? Christy Moore's own page — lyric and the story of hearing it — is the primary source. Kilmainham Gaol Museum's Transportation page lays out the system the song's narrator was shipped through. On video, Inside Irish Music tells the story behind “Back Home in Derry” in a Short, and Davy Holden's interviews recorded after Sands' death — republican and unionist voices both — have been watched more than 200,000 times.

— hear us play it live (video above).

Dominic Behan wrote "Come Out Ye Black and Tans" in the early 1960s, a generation after the events it argues about. It is one of the best-known Irish rebel songs ever written — and most people who sing the chorus have never looked at who it is actually aimed at. It is not, for the most part, aimed at the Black and Tans at all.

Behan knew this world from inside his own house. He was the son of Stephen Behan, an IRA veteran, and the younger brother of Brendan Behan. The song is family memory set to music: a son writing down his father's Dublin, in his father's voice.

Who Were the Black and Tans? Ireland, 1920–21

The Black and Tans were reinforcements sent to Ireland in 1920–21, during the War of Independence, to strengthen the Royal Irish Constabulary against the IRA. Most were British veterans of the First World War. A shortage of standard uniforms put them in a mismatch of dark RIC tunics and khaki army trousers — the two colours that gave them their name.

Their reputation was earned quickly. The Tans became known for reprisals against civilians — burned homes, beatings, killings — in answer to IRA attacks. A century later, the name still works in Ireland as shorthand for the worst of that war.

The Twist: Behan's Song Is Aimed at His Dublin Neighbours

Here is what the verses actually do. The song opens not on a battlefield but on a Dublin street, in the 1920s and 30s, with Behan's father Stephen coming home drunk and calling out the neighbours.

Those neighbours were working-class Dubliners, Catholic and Protestant, who had served in the British Army. Stephen Behan's taunt — the line that gives the song its chorus — invites them to come out and fight like men, and to show their wives how they won medals down in Flanders. "Black and Tans" is the insult he throws across the street: in his mouth, it means men who took the King's shilling and served the empire, not the uniformed force of 1920.

Only after that street row do the verses widen to the whole history Stephen is arguing from: Parnell, the executed leaders of 1916 — the men whose story our Grace post tells from inside Kilmainham — and the empire's other wars, in the song's words, how they slew poor Arabs two by two, and Zulus with spears and bows and arrows against rifles.

A Republican Anthem Sung to a Loyalist Tune

The melody carries its own argument. Behan adapted an old Jacobite air, Rosc Catha na Mumhan, and that air traces back to The Boyne Water — an Ulster loyalist song. A republican anthem, sung to a tune with loyalist roots.

That is not an embarrassment to the song; it is how Irish music has always worked. Tunes were common property, and both traditions in Ireland ended up singing some of the same airs with different words and opposite loyalties.

The Behans run through this blog. Dominic's brother Brendan is the writer tied to The Auld Triangle and sung about in Streams of Whiskey — one Dublin family, three posts. And the rebel-song tradition Dominic wrote in runs forward to Men Behind the Wire, the next generation's song about the next round of the same fight.

January 2020: No. 1 in Ireland, as a Protest

The Wolfe Tones recorded it in 1972, on Let the People Sing, and their version is the one the world knows. In January 2020, it proved the song is a living thing and not a museum piece.

When the Irish government proposed an official commemoration of the RIC, the public argument was immediate, and the Wolfe Tones' recording was its soundtrack. The song went to No. 1 on the Ireland and UK iTunes charts, No. 1 on the Scottish singles sales chart, and No. 29 on the Irish chart. The Wolfe Tones gave the proceeds to the Peter McVerry Trust, a homeless charity.

A song about a drunk man shouting across a 1930s Dublin street topped the charts in 2020 as an act of political protest. We play it because that is what it is for: it keeps an argument alive that Ireland is still having, and it does it the way Stephen Behan did — out loud, in company, with the neighbours listening.

Want to dig deeper? Wikipedia's article on Come Out, Ye Black and Tans gives the full account of the song, its verses and the tune's history, and its companion piece on the Wolfe Tones recording covers the 2020 chart run. On video, Davy Holden's The History Behind: 'Come Out Ye Black and Tans' tells the song's story at length.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Four Green Fields" is Tommy Makem's song about an old woman and her land. The woman is Ireland. Her four green fields are Ireland's four provinces — Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connacht — and one of them, she tells us, is "in bondage": taken by strangers, and not yet returned. It is one of the clearest explanations of partition ever put into a folk song, which is what "four green fields meaning" searches are really asking about.

Makem wrote the song in 1967, in the voice of an ancient lament, and it was sung all through the Troubles that followed and by the Irish diaspora around the world. It sounds like it has existed for centuries. It hasn't — and the man who wrote it said plainly what it was for.

Tommy Makem and the Old Woman: "Four Green Fields" (1967) Explained

Makem told the story of the song's spark himself: driving through the "no man's land" along the border, he saw an old woman tending her livestock, indifferent to the political boundary running through the land around her. The land was older than the argument. She became the woman of the song.

That woman has a long pedigree in Irish writing. She is Cathleen ni Houlihan, the traditional personification of Ireland as an old woman who becomes young again when young men fight for her — and some of the words Makem's old woman speaks are taken directly from W. B. Yeats's early play Cathleen ni Houlihan. Makem was not inventing a symbol. He was picking up one that Irish literature had carried for generations.

In his published songbook, Makem stated his purpose in his own words: "I wrote this song in 1967 and it's a plea for Ireland to be left to chart her own destiny without interference… Surely after eight hundred years of 'interference' it's not too much to ask." Makem fronted the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, the group that carried Irish ballads around the world in the 1960s; Inside Irish Music tells the story of the accident that launched the Clancy Brothers, the ballad boom this song came out of.

What Are the Four Green Fields? Ulster, Munster, Leinster, Connacht — and the One "In Bondage"

Here is the geography the song depends on, and it is the geography that makes the song work. Ulster, the northern province, has nine counties. When Ireland was partitioned in 1920, only six of those nine counties remained under British control, forming Northern Ireland; the other three Ulster counties — Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan — are in the Republic.

So the field "in bondage" is not the whole of Ulster, and the old woman's lost field is bigger than the border that crosses it. That is the precise grief at the centre of the song: the fourth field is divided against itself, part taken and part not, and the woman counts it as one field still. Partition lived at the human scale — inside families as much as on maps — is the subject of The Orange and the Green, and the hopeful answer to this song is On The One Road, "North and South" in a single song. The Troubles years that this song soundtracked are also behind Sunday Bloody Sunday.

One title warning, since readers mix them up constantly: this is not "Green Fields of France." That is a different song, about a First World War grave, and it has its own post here. We tell the nine-counties point — the whole song in one fact — in our Short on Four Green Fields.

The Same Four Fields in Stained Glass

Makem was not the only artist to put the four fields to work. The stained-glass artist Evie Hone made My Four Green Fields for the Irish government's pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, where it won first prize for stained glass. The window carried the same pointed message — four fields, one of them marked off — into a showcase for Ireland in front of the Irish-American diaspora in New York, thirty years before Makem wrote the song.

The window now hangs in Government Buildings in Dublin, where it forms the backdrop to Taoiseach press conferences. Most viewers watching those broadcasts never learn what the four fields mean. Now you have: it is this song, in glass, twenty-eight years early.

To read more: The Tommy Makem Songbag, at The Balladeers, has Makem's own notes on his songs. Wikipedia covers Four Green Fields — the Yeats connection and the border story — and Hone's window at My Four Green Fields.

— hear us play it live (video above).

Sean South was a Limerick city man. He was not from Garryowen — Garryowen is a district of Limerick, and the ballad put him there because the name fit the tune. He died, aged 28, in an attack on a police barracks in Brookeborough, County Fermanagh, on the night of 31 December 1956 – 1 January 1957, and within a week a ballad about him was in print. That speed is the story of this song.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why a Failed Campaign Produced a Lasting Song

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

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

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

— hear us play it live (video above).

"The Men Behind the Wire" was written in 1971 by Paddy McGuigan and recorded by the Belfast group Barleycorn. It is about internment: the British government's policy of imprisoning people without trial in Northern Ireland. Within weeks of its release, the song was No. 1 in Ireland, its royalties were going to the families of the men it was written about, and the man who wrote it was in prison himself.

This is a song that works as a primary source. Almost everything in it can be checked against the record, and the record is stark.

Operation Demetrius: The Dawn Raids of 9 August 1971

Internment began on 9 August 1971 with Operation Demetrius, a sweep of dawn raids across Northern Ireland. In the first sweep, 342 people were arrested — and not one of them was a loyalist. The arrest lists were badly out of date: 104 of those taken were released within 48 hours, and the names on the lists included civil-rights figures who had never been in the IRA.

The men behind the wire were held at Long Kesh, at Magilligan, and aboard the prison ship HMS Maidstone. Internment ran until December 1975, and 1,981 people were interned in total. Rather than ending the violence, internment drove support for the IRA up — a result the song's furious reception made plain at the time.

The archive record of internment is kept by CAIN, Ulster University's conflict archive; the dawn raids and the numbers above are set out in their Internment summary. The songs around this one on the blog tell the surrounding story: Come Out Ye Black and Tans is the earlier generation's fight, and Sean South of Garryowen is the rebel song of the generation before this one.

Banned by RTÉ, No. 1 for Five Weeks

Barleycorn recorded the song in Belfast. It was pressed by Release Records in Dublin and released on 14 December 1971. RTÉ, Ireland's national broadcaster, banned it in early January 1972 — and Radio Éireann was flooded with complaints at the refusal.

The ban did not work. The single reached No. 1 in the Irish charts on 22 January 1972 and stayed there for three weeks, then returned to No. 1 for two more weeks from 15 February. It sold more copies than any single previously released in Ireland. The royalties were donated to the families of the internees.

The second run at No. 1 opened in the weeks after 30 January 1972, when Derry's anti-internment march ended in Bloody Sunday — the subject of our Sunday Bloody Sunday post. Davy Holden tells this song's story in video form in The History Behind: "Men Behind The Wire".

The Songwriter Was Interned Himself

The last verse of the story wrote itself. Paddy McGuigan was picked up in a later round of internment and held aboard the Maidstone — the prison ship holding the men he had written about. Many read it as the state answering the songwriter directly.

Writing songs from inside the wire became part of this tradition, and it did not end in the 1970s: Back Home in Derry was written a decade later by Bobby Sands in Long Kesh itself.

Two sources carry the detail: Irish Number Ones on the Barleycorn single — the RTÉ ban, the chart run, and where it fell against Bloody Sunday — and CAIN's Internment — Summary of Events for the record of Operation Demetrius.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"On The One Road" asks a divided country to travel together. Its chorus names Ireland's people by region — North men, South men, comrades all; Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Donegal — and its closing call is to "make our land a nation once again." The song was written by Frank O'Donovan for a performance at the Theatre Royal, Dublin, in 1942, two decades after Ireland was partitioned into North and South. The partition is the ground the song stands on, and the chorus is its answer.

People search for the On The One Road meaning because the song sits on the rebel-song shelf while arguing against division. It is sung by the Wolfe Tones, it turns up wherever Irish unity is discussed, and its own words are addressed to everybody. This post follows the song's own account of itself: who wrote it, how it came back, and what the lyrics actually ask for.

Frank O'Donovan Wrote It for the Theatre Royal, Dublin, in 1942

The writer was Frank O'Donovan, and the setting was a theatre, not a battlefield. According to Derek Warfield's album notes — Warfield is a founding member of the Wolfe Tones, and this is the band's own account of the song — O'Donovan wrote "On The One Road" for a performance at the Theatre Royal in Dublin in 1942.

That date matters. Partition was twenty years old. The border was a settled fact of daily life, and the generation that had fought the War of Independence and the Civil War was still active in Irish public life. A song written for a Dublin stage in 1942 that calls North and South "comrades all" is making its argument in public, in front of a paying audience, in the capital of the South. It was not a campfire song. It was written to be heard by a room full of strangers and to ask them something.

Ardoyne, 1971: How the Song Came Back

Warfield's notes tell the second half of the story. In 1971 the song was revived by the singing of people in Ardoyne, a working-class nationalist district of Belfast, at the point when internment and street conflict were remaking life in the North. From that revival it became a Wolfe Tones staple, carried by the band onto records and stages across Ireland and the diaspora.

The Balladeers' page for the Wolfe Tones' Greatest Hits describes the song as "synonymous with the Wolfe Tones," and describes what it does in a room: diaspora audiences "from Australia to Canada" unite to it. Anyone who has played it to an Irish-American crowd has seen the same thing. The song gives a mixed room — different generations, different politics, different distances from Ireland — one chorus everybody can sing without qualifying it.

For the sixty-second background the song assumes, Davy Holden's Short When Northern and Southern Ireland Split explains the partition the chorus is answering.

"North Men, South Men": What the Lyrics Actually Ask For

The lyric makes the argument twice, once by place and once by class. By place: Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Donegal — a city from each end of the island and points between. By class, the song's roll call runs "Tinker, tailor, every mother's son" through "Rich man, poor man, every man in line." Nobody is left standing outside the road. The unity being asked for is not only North with South; it is everybody with everybody, "all together just like Auld Lang Syne" — a name-check our own Auld Lang Syne post follows up.

That breadth is what separates this song from its shelf-mates. Sean South of Garryowen is a song of one side and one raid, from the same broad era. Men Behind the Wire comes out of the same Ardoyne-and-internment world that revived "On The One Road" in 1971, and sings about the men taken away. Four Green Fields draws the same map as an old woman with four fields, one of them in strangers' hands. The Orange and the Green handles the division with a joke about a mixed marriage. And Sunday Bloody Sunday is the modern pair to this one: peace put ahead of politics.

"On The One Road" is older than all of that company except the division itself. A theatre song from 1942, revived on a Belfast street in 1971, and sung since by people on several continents who agree about very little else — the song does in a room what it describes on the road.

The band's own account is in Derek Warfield's album notes, and The Balladeers' Wolfe Tones Greatest Hits page has the "synonymous with the Wolfe Tones" assessment and the Australia-to-Canada audiences in the band's own framing.

— hear us play it live (video above).

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Happened to Grace Gifford After 1916?

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

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

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

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

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

— hear us play it live (video above).

"By the rising of the moon" is an order, not a description. The song opens with men being told when to gather: at moonrise, quietly, with their pikes, at a named place. It is a ballad about the Irish rebellion of 1798 — written nearly seventy years later, by a man preparing for the next one.

That distance is the point of the song. It is not a report from 1798. It is 1798 handed down, deliberately, to a new generation of rebels.

Written by a Fenian: John Keegan Casey and 1798

The writer was John Keegan Casey (1846–70), known as the "Fenian Poet." The ballad was in circulation by about 1865, and Casey published the lyric in his 1866 collection A Wreath of Shamrocks. He based it on the failed 1798 rising at Granard, County Longford — one of the last stands of the United Irishmen in that rebellion.

The United Irishmen of 1798 were Catholics, Protestants, and Presbyterians together, aiming at an Irish republic, and the rising was put down with great loss of life. Casey, writing as a young Fenian in the 1860s, reached back to that defeat and turned it into a rallying song. The air he used is "The Wearing of the Green," the great song of 1798's aftermath — the same air, in a comic key, as The Orange and the Green.

"The Pikes Must Be Together": What the Chorus Is Ordering

The chorus is a set of instructions. The pikes must be together at the rising of the moon. The pike was the poor man's weapon of 1798 — a long shaft with a steel head, cheap to make and carried by men who could not afford muskets. The rebels themselves were called "croppies," for the cropped hair that marked them out.

The verses carry the mechanics of a secret rising. There is a signal token — a whistled marching tune, so a man in the dark could tell friend from stranger without a word spoken. Casey put the actual working details of an underground army into a chorus, and the chorus is what survived: thousands of people who could not tell you what a signal token was can sing the words.

Why a Song About 1798 Was Aimed at 1867

Casey's hope in the song was aimed forward. The Fenians were organising in the 1860s, and the rising they were steeling men for came in 1867. It failed too. Casey paid for his part in that world: the Clancy Brothers' liner notes record that he suffered in prison and died at twenty-three as a result of his sufferings — a poet of one failed rising, killed by the preparation for another.

That chain is why the song is still sung. A Fenian wrote about 1798 to move the men of 1867, and the song kept moving people after him. The next chapter of the same story is a wedding on the eve of an execution in 1916 — our post on Grace — and the rebel-ballad tradition Casey helped set runs on to Sean South of Garryowen.

The best primary source is the Clancy Brothers' own liner notes, archived at The Balladeers, with Casey's story as the singers who carried the song told it. On the ground itself, Davy Holden's 1798 Rebellion Tour walks the actual sites with historian Colum Ó Ruairc, and his Short on the grave of Theobald Wolfe Tone is worth a minute. Inside Irish Music's history of "The Wearing of the Green" covers the air both this song and 1798 share.

— hear us play it live (video above).