"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).

"The Rattlin' Bog" is a cumulative song — the kind that builds a list and makes the singers carry all of it, every verse, in order, at speed. It starts with a bog, puts a tree in the bog, a branch on the tree, and keeps going down through smaller and smaller things until the list ends at a flea on a feather on a bird in a nest on an egg in the tree in the bog. Miss one item and the whole room knows.

There is no author to credit and no single correct set of words, and that is not a gap in the record. It is the record. This is a song that exists because thousands of singers kept it going, each adding their own version to the pile. This post pins down what is actually known about it — its index number, its other names, and how it is performed — and answers the question in its first word: what "rattlin'" means.

Roud 129: One Song, 180 Versions, No Correct Lyrics

In the Roud Folk Song Index, the great catalogue of traditional songs in English, "The Rattlin' Bog" is No. 129. Some 180 versions of it have been collected from oral tradition. It travels under other titles too, including "The Everlasting Circle" and "The Green Grass Grew All Around," and it has analogues — songs built the same cumulative way — in French, Italian, German, and Dutch. Its earliest traced form appears as "March to the Battlefield" in Riley's Flute Melodies.

Read those facts together and the song's nature is clear. A written song has an original. This one has a family: 180 collected versions, in several countries and languages, sharing a structure and a chorus and differing in the details. The list of things in the bog varies from singer to singer and place to place. Every version that keeps the build and the chorus is a real version.

That family history is also the song's route into Irish sets and American summers. It has spent decades as a U.S. summer-camp marching song, sung by American kids who mostly have no idea they are singing a song Irish pub crowds claim as their own — and both claims are true, which is what an oral tradition means.

Why It Speeds Up: The Song as a Contest

The performance is the point of the song. The tempo typically rises verse by verse, so the list that was comfortable at the start becomes a genuine test by the end. Often one singer leads the "Now on that…" lines that introduce each new item, while the whole group joins in for the cumulative list and the chorus. The leader's job is to keep the order straight. The room's job is to keep up.

That makes the song a contest disguised as a chorus. The challenge is built in: memory, breath, and speed, all at once, in public. Singers drop items, rooms collapse laughing, and the failure is part of the entertainment rather than an interruption of it. It is one of the few songs in our set where the band is visibly working — guitar and bodhrán holding the tempo steady while the list gets longer and faster and the margin for error gets thinner.

The other songs in our set built on the room joining in explain the same mechanic from different sides. I'll Tell Me Ma survives as a children's ring game, a song kept by being played. Irish Pub Song is about participation as the pub's whole purpose. And Kiss Me I'm Irish is our other closer built on the whole room singing whether they planned to or not.

What "Rattlin'" Actually Means

The first word is the one people misread. "Rattlin'" does not describe a sound. In older Irish-English slang, "rattlin'" means excellent, splendid, lively — a rattlin' bog is a splendid bog. The title is a compliment, not a noise report.

It is a fitting name for the song's own career. A splendid bog, a rare old tree, and a list that has been sung in camps, pubs, kitchens, and sessions, in at least five languages' worth of versions, by people who learned it from other people and passed it on the same way. No author, no original, no finished text — just the build, the chorus, the rising speed, and the next singer stepping up to try the list.

For how the song lives now in American group singing, the USC Digital Folklore Archives' Rattlin' Bog page documents it from fieldwork, and the song's Roud 129 version family is laid out at Wikipedia, "The Rattlin' Bog".

— 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).

"The Jolly Roving Tar" is set in Belfast. A sailor named Johnny comes home with money in his pocket, the lassies love him while the money lasts, he spends a night ashore with his girl, and in the morning he tells her he cannot marry her — he is married to the sea. Then the song turns to the women listening and gives them the warning this post's title quotes: never trust an Irishman an inch above your knee.

It sounds like a song that has always existed. It has not. It was written, on purpose, in an old style, by the leader of the Irish Rovers — and the story of who wrote it, and where, is the Irish emigrant story told in miniature.

Not Traditional: George Millar Wrote It for the Irish Rovers

On the Irish Rovers' album Drunken Sailor (2012), "The Jolly Roving Tar" is credited to George Millar, the band's Ballymena-born leader. It is a modern song written in the manner of an old one — a pub chorus song, built to be shouted along to — and it is not a work shanty. Nobody hauled ropes to it. It was written for the stage and the pub, by a man who knew exactly which old songs he was imitating.

That album does double duty in our set: our post on All For Me Grog is about another track from the same Drunken Sailor record. Drunken Sailor itself and Haul Away Joe are the real work songs of the sea cluster, and this song is their shore-going cousin.

Back in Belfast Town: The Song, Verse by Verse

Johnny's story is the sailor's shore leave told without varnish. Back in Belfast town, the lassies are glad to see a tar with pay in his pocket — until the money is spent, and then the welcome thins. He has his night with his girl. In the morning comes the reckoning: he would marry her, he says, but he is married to the sea, and the sea does not give its husbands back.

The last verse stops telling the story and starts giving advice. "Come all you bonnie lasses, and a warning take by me" — and the warning is the title of this post, with the price attached: he'll leave you in the morning with a daughter or a son. Then the chorus rolls back in — pass the flowing bowl, boys, there's whiskey in the jar — and the room sings along with the man the song just warned them about. That tension is the song. The warning is sincere and nobody in the pub is going to act on it. It pairs naturally with our Irish Pub Song post: the same room, the same chorus, the same cheerful refusal to learn.

Careful: There's Another "Jolly Roving Tar" (Harrigan, 1885)

Search this title and you will find two songs wearing it, and they have nothing to do with each other. The other "Jolly Roving Tar" — also called "Get Up Jack, John Sit Down," Roud 2807 — was written by Edward Harrigan, words, and Dave Braham, music, for the New York stage show Old Lavender in 1885. It was still being sung in the 1940s, when it was collected from Lena Bourne Fish in New Hampshire, who had learned it from an old whalerman.

Harrigan is a good Irish-American story in himself — he grew up on "Cork Row" by New York's East River shipyards — but his tar is not Millar's tar. One is an American stage song from 1885; the other is an Irish Rovers song from a 2012 album. If a search result mentions Harrigan, it is about a different song.

Emigrants Singing Home: Ballymena to Toronto

The Irish Rovers are a diaspora band. The members were men from Ballymena, County Antrim, who emigrated to Canada and formed the group in Toronto in 1963, after meeting at an Irish function. They were later honoured at EPIC, Dublin's Irish Emigration Museum, as one of Ireland's great exports. So the chain runs: Ballymena men leave Ireland, build a career in Canada singing Irish music, and their leader writes, in Toronto, a song about an Irish sailor coming home to Belfast — a home the Rovers themselves had left. Emigrants singing about the sailor who always leaves again. It is a pub chorus and also a postcard sent in the wrong direction, from the men who stayed away to the port that let them go.

For the facts: The Balladeers' discography of the Drunken Sailor album carries the Millar credit and the full track listing, and Mainly Norfolk's page on the other song of this name will keep any reader who searches the title from mixing the two up.

— hear us play it live (video above).

Charlie rides the Boston subway forever because he cannot pay the extra nickel to get off. That is the whole plot of "Charlie on the MTA" — and behind the joke sits a real mayor's race, a real fare fight, a candidate who finished last, and a song that outlasted every politician in the story.

Boston is the most Irish-American big city in the United States, and this is its song by adoption. The candidate at the centre of it was an O'Brien, and the song's second life was sealed by Boston's Irish-American punk band, the Dropkick Murphys. It sits in our set as an Irish-American city song, the same way Body of an American does.

Boston, 1949: A Nickel Exit Fare and a Mayor's Race

In 1949, Boston's transit system — by then the Metropolitan Transit Authority — charged some riders an extra exit fare on top of the fare they had already paid. To working people, it was a tax on getting home.

Walter A. O'Brien, the Progressive Party candidate for mayor that year, campaigned against it, and his campaign had a song. Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Lomax Hawes wrote "Charlie on the MTA" for him: a ordinary working man, handed a sandwich by his wife as the train goes through the station, riding beneath the streets of Boston because he cannot raise the extra nickel to get off.

O'Brien could not afford radio advertising, so the campaign played its songs from a sound truck touring the city. He was fined $10 for disturbing the peace for doing it. He finished last in the election. But the song did its work anyway: it helped protesters gather roughly 100,000 signatures against the fare increase, and Charlie's ride became the argument everyone in Boston could hum.

The tune the song rides on is older than the campaign. It comes from "The Ship That Never Returned," the same melody family as "Wreck of the Old 97" — Charlie was set, deliberately, in the long American line of songs about men who never get home.

Why the Kingston Trio Sang ‘George’ O'Brien, Not Walter

The song became a national hit in 1959, when the Kingston Trio recorded it. By then, Walter O'Brien's politics were a problem for a commercial record: the Progressive Party had been branded communist-leaning in the McCarthy years, and naming its candidate could have cost the Trio airplay and bookings.

So the Trio changed one word. Their Charlie rides for "George O'Brien," a man who never existed. The fare, the wife, the sandwich and the eternal ride all stayed exactly the same — only the candidate's first name was scrubbed out.

The song travelled further than Boston in those years. When the Kingston Trio version became a hit, sympathisers as far away as Germany mailed nickels to the transit authority to free Charlie.

Skinhead on the MBTA: Dropkick Murphys Take Charlie Punk (1998)

Charlie's route into the Irish-American pub repertoire runs through one band. In 1998, the Dropkick Murphys — Boston's own Irish-American punk band, formed in the city's Irish working-class neighbourhoods — remade the song as “Skinhead on the MBTA.”

That recording is the bridge between a 1949 campaign song and the set list of a band like ours. The Dropkicks took Charlie out of the folk-revival world and put him in the Irish-American bar-band world, where he has stayed. Our post on Fairytale of New York tells the same kind of story for another city: a song about belonging to a place that is not Ireland, written by the children of people who left it.

2004: The Transit System Names Its Card After the Man It Trapped

The ending is the best part, and it is true. In 2004, Boston's transit authority — now the MBTA — introduced its reusable fare card and named it the CharlieCard, after the man its predecessor's fare policy had trapped underground. The Kingston Trio performed at the dedication, and Governor Mitt Romney attended.

The system that once fined a candidate $10 for singing about its fares now puts Charlie's name in every rider's wallet. Walter O'Brien lost his election and had his name taken out of his own song. Charlie never got off the train. He won anyway.

Want the full history? The MBTA's own article on Bess Lomax Hawes, the folklorist who co-wrote the song covers the campaign, the signatures, the Dropkick Murphys remake and the CharlieCard, and Wikipedia's M.T.A. (song) article traces the tune back to “The Ship That Never Returned.”

— hear us play it live (video above).

A boy is christened David Anthony, but his father calls him William and his mother calls him Pat. That is the whole joke of "The Orange and the Green," and it only works because everyone listening already knows the setup: a Catholic mother, a Protestant father, and a child being raised inside both Irelands at once.

The song tells it as comedy — the christening, the schooling, the two sets of loyalties pulling at one kid — but the divide underneath it is real, and the song has lasted because mixed families lived exactly what it jokes about.

Written in Liverpool: Anthony Murphy and "The Biggest Mix-Up"

The song was written by Anthony Murphy of Liverpool, and it is also known as "The Biggest Mix-Up." Liverpool matters here. It was the most Irish of English cities, the port generations of emigrants passed through or settled in, and the divide crossed the water with them: Liverpool's Orange lodges march every July for the Battle of the Boyne (1690), just as they do in Ireland.

So Murphy was not writing about a faraway quarrel. He had both colours in his own street. A comic song about a Catholic–Protestant marriage lands differently when the two traditions are not abstractions but neighbours, workmates, and in-laws — which in Liverpool, as in Belfast or Derry, they were.

What the Flag's Colours Actually Mean (Meagher, 1848)

The song's title is the flag's. On 7 March 1848, Thomas Francis Meagher flew a tricolour from 33 The Mall in Waterford, and in April 1848 he set out what the colours stand for, in words worth quoting in full: "The white in the centre signifies a lasting truce between Orange and Green and I trust that beneath its folds the hands of Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics may be clasped in generous and heroic brotherhood."

Green stands for the Catholic, nationalist tradition. Orange stands for the Protestant tradition and the followers of William of Orange. White, between them, is the truce — not either side winning, but the two living under one flag. One common question: is it orange or gold? It is orange. The Irish government's own flag guidelines say calling it gold is a misrepresentation.

A Mixed Family Is the Flag in Human Form

Meagher designed a flag about two traditions sharing one country. Murphy's song is about two traditions sharing one house, and one child. William to his father and Pat to his mother, the boy in the song is the white stripe — the truce, walking around in human form, claimed by both sides and belonging to both.

Meagher's own life turned the flag into an Irish-American story as well. He was transported to Van Diemen's Land for his part in the Young Ireland rising, escaped to America, and went on to found the Irish Brigade in the US Civil War. The man who designed the tricolour ended up an Irish-American soldier.

The tune adds one more layer. "The Orange and the Green" is sung to the air of "The Wearing of the Green" — the same melody as our post on The Rising of the Moon, a rebel song about 1798. The comic song and the rebel song are one tune: the divide and the hope of ending it, carried on the same notes. For the other side of Ireland's divisions, see Four Green Fields, and for the same hope stated straight, On The One Road and Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Want the official version? The Department of the Taoiseach's National Flag guidelines give the government's own history of the flag and its protocol. For the tune's darker history, Inside Irish Music's The Deadly History Behind "The Wearing of the Green" covers the air this song shares. And here's a quick Short of us playing it.

— 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).

"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).

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).

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

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

Written by the Galway Poet for Harry Clifton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Emigrant Song Ireland Took Back

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

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

— hear us play it live (video above).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— hear us play it live (video above).

"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).