"Green Fields of France" — Eric Bogle's original title for it was "No Man's Land" — was written in 1976 by Bogle, a Scottish-born singer who had emigrated to Australia. He wrote it after walking the military cemeteries of Flanders, where the graves run in long rows. The song sits the singer down beside one grave: Willie McBride, a soldier who died in 1916 at the age of nineteen.

It is not a song about a battle. One man talks to one dead man and asks him questions he cannot answer. That is why the song has outlasted nearly every other song written about that war.

Who Was Willie McBride? The Real Men Behind the Name

Bogle answered this question himself: he had no one soldier in mind. He chose the name "McBride" partly because it rhymed with "graveside," and partly on purpose — an Irish name, chosen as a reminder of Irish sacrifice at a time when anti-Irish feeling in Britain ran strong. He has also said that every soldier in the cemetery is a Willie McBride.

People have gone looking. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission lists eight men named William McBride and six more listed as "W. McBride" who died in France and Belgium — and none of them matches the song exactly, because the song says nineteen in 1916. The closest are two men buried at Authuille Military Cemetery on the Somme, both in Irish regiments. One is Private William McBride of the 9th Battalion, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, from County Armagh, who died on 22 April 1916 — but he was twenty-one, not nineteen. The second "W." McBride at Authuille has no age recorded. An Armagh historian and the McBride family argue the Armagh man is the one whose grave Bogle sat beside. That is their researched claim, not a settled fact — and the honest answer is that the grave, if there was one grave, held a real young man whose name happened to fit a rhyme.

Ireland's Forgotten First World War Soldiers

The name matters because of what Ireland did with its First World War dead afterward. Roughly 210,000 Irishmen served in the war, and perhaps 35,000 were killed — the counts differ depending on who is counted, and the Irish War Memorial Records of 1923 put the total dead at 49,400, a figure that includes men in Irish regiments born outside Ireland. Every one of them was a volunteer — Ireland was exempt from conscription.

After independence, the new Irish state largely forgot these men, because they had worn British uniforms. For decades their service went uncommemorated. That long official silence, and Ireland's slow recovery of these soldiers' memory, is the Irish story inside this song. A different post on this blog, Four Green Fields, uses "green fields" for Tommy Makem's Ireland-as-mother; Bogle's green fields are French cemeteries, and the two songs get mixed up often enough to separate them.

What the Song Asks

The verses are questions. Did the drums beat slowly at the funeral? Did the pipes play? And then the question the whole song turns on: did the men who sent him, and the men who followed him into the next war, learn anything? Bogle's generation watched another war being prepared while the first one's survivors were still alive, and the anger is quiet because it does not need to be loud.

It belongs on a short shelf of songs that keep named dead men from being forgotten. Our post on The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is about the same job done for twenty-nine sailors on Lake Superior. And the generation Willie McBride belonged to had two roads out of poverty: emigration and enlistment. Thousands Are Sailing sings about the ones who took the boat.

From Irish No. 1 to Dropkick Murphys

The Fureys & Davey Arthur took the song to No. 1 in Ireland from their 1979 album The Green Fields of France, and that is largely how it became Ireland's song. In 2005 Irish-American band Dropkick Murphys recorded it, carrying it back across the Atlantic. In the United States it is heard in November, around Veterans Day — November 11 was Armistice Day, marking the end of the First World War, before it was renamed Veterans Day in 1954 and widened to honour all who served.

The Irish Family Detective's research on Willie McBride is the best single read on the identity question. Dublin's Irish National War Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge is a place readers can visit, and the Irish War Memorial Records on Google Arts & Culture lets you search for a family name. Inside Irish Music's Truth Behind Ireland's Most Famous Anti-War Song is worth watching, and History Ireland's Armistice Day essay covers the forgetting and the remembering.

— hear us play it live (video above).

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).

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).

"Sunday Bloody Sunday" is U2's song, the opening track of their 1983 album War. Its title names a real day: Sunday, 30 January 1972, in Derry, when British soldiers shot unarmed civil rights marchers. Thirteen men were killed that day, and a fourteenth died of his wounds four months later.

The song is famous for two things at once — the event it names, and the band's insistence, repeated for years, that it was not a rebel song. Both need explaining, because the second only makes sense once you understand the first, and because there is another well-known song with exactly this title that says the opposite.

Derry, 30 January 1972: The March Against Internment

The march, organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, was a protest against internment — imprisonment without trial, introduced the previous August and applied overwhelmingly to the nationalist community. Between ten and twenty thousand people marched. Paratroopers opened fire. Thirteen men died on the day; a fourteenth, wounded, died months later.

Internment is the direct link between this song and Men Behind the Wire, the song written about the men interned in that same policy. One event produced both the protest song of 1971 and the march that ended in the shootings of 1972.

It is worth being precise about the name. There was an earlier Bloody Sunday in Dublin in 1920, at Croke Park — a different event, and a common source of confusion. U2's title refers to Derry in 1972.

In 2010, the Saville Inquiry reported on the day. It concluded that the shootings were "unjustified" and "unjustifiable," that none of those shot posed a threat, and the British prime minister apologised.

"This Is Not a Rebel Song": Why Bono Had to Say It

The lyrics began as music by The Edge with words by Bono, reworked from an early version that condemned the IRA into a song that attacked violence without taking a side. Live, Bono introduced it by saying, "This is not a rebel song," first at Red Rocks in 1983, waving a white flag — because the band feared it would be taken up as a pro-IRA anthem.

He kept having to say it. In Denver on 8 November 1987, the day of the IRA's Enniskillen bombing, he condemned the bombing from the stage in the middle of this song. Bono has also said the song sets Bloody Sunday against Easter Sunday — the violence of one Sunday held against the peace of the other — which is where the repeated "Sunday" in the lyric comes from.

Our post on Zombie covers another Irish song written in response to a bombing, twenty years later, and Back Home in Derry is about the same city as the 1972 march, in a different century of its story.

Two Songs, One Title: Lennon in 1972, U2 in 1983

John Lennon and Yoko Ono wrote their "Sunday Bloody Sunday" on 31 January 1972, the day after the shootings, and recorded it within weeks for Some Time in New York City. Lennon's song is openly partisan: it tells the British to go home, urges "keep Ireland for the Irish," and Lennon donated royalties to the Northern Ireland civil rights movement. He explained it as a reaction, not a considered statement: he heard in New York about people shot dead in Ireland and reacted immediately.

The song we play is U2's. The two songs share a title and an event and nothing else — one was written in a day, in anger, taking a side; the other was written eleven years later by a band from Dublin determined not to. Knowing the Lennon song exists explains why U2 spent so long insisting on what their song was not.

The CAIN archive at Ulster University keeps a summary of Bloody Sunday, including both the Widgery and Saville findings. Davy Holden's Short Bloody Sunday 1972 in Derry gives the day in a minute, and Wikipedia sets out the Lennon and Ono song in full.

— 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).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— hear us play it live (video above).

"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).