"Raglan Road" began as a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, written about Hilda Moriarty, a young medical student he met in Dublin in the 1940s. Kavanagh was 40, a published poet who called himself a peasant poet. Hilda was 22. He fell for her, she did not fall back, and he put her in a poem that Ireland has never stopped singing.

Written for Hilda Moriarty — Published Under Another Woman's Name

Hilda Moriarty was a medical student at University College Dublin whom Kavanagh encountered around Raglan Road in Ballsbridge, Dublin. In RTÉ's 1987 Kavanagh documentary Gentle Tiger, she told the story herself. She had teased the self-described "peasant poet" about his subjects — stony grey soil, cabbages, and turnips — and told him to write about something else. He answered that he would immortalize her in poetry, went away, and wrote it. She also said, plainly, that the age gap between them was a main reason the relationship failed. She later married Donogh O'Malley.

When the poem first hit the newsstands in the Irish Press on 3 October 1946, it bore the header "Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away" rather than "Raglan Road." Kavanagh chose "Miriam"—the name of his brother Peter's girlfriend—as a clever pseudonym to shelter Hilda from public attention. It wasn't until his 1964 Collected Poems reached print that the piece adopted its now-famous title, “On Raglan Road”.

This deliberate title switch reveals the intimate core of the narrative. Knowing from its opening lines that the romance was destined to falter, Kavanagh still penned this poignant tribute, publishing a parting message to his muse while cloaking her identity behind an assumed name.

The Air Kavanagh Chose: “Fáinne Geal an Lae”

The poem's iconic melody comes from an earlier air, "Fáinne Geal an Lae" ("The Dawning of the Day"). Originally an Irish-language song published by Edward Walsh in 1847, it was translated into English by Patrick Weston Joyce in 1873. Rather than being a choice made later by another performer, historical accounts show that Kavanagh always intended for his words to be set to this specific air.

Shortly after writing the piece, Kavanagh was remembered by Benedict Kiely test-singing it to the air, and a radio recording exists of the poet performing it to the melody himself. The union of poem and tune was already fully forged by the author before Luke Kelly ever sang it; the verse simply awaited its ideal interpreter.

The Bailey: Kavanagh Hands Luke Kelly the Song

The landmark encounter occurred in the 1960s at The Bailey pub in Dublin, where Patrick Kavanagh formally handed the poem over to Luke Kelly. Kelly consistently credited the poet with passing along the song, which Kelly went on to introduce to audiences across the globe. While persistent folklore claims Kavanagh demanded five pounds in exchange, that detail remains an unverified tale.

What is documented is the enduring legacy of their collaboration. The Dubliners released "Raglan Road" in 1971 as the B-side to "Scorn Not His Simplicity," and their definitive recording later served as the centerpiece for the 1986 compilation Luke's Legacy. By approaching the work as both elevated literature and a spirited pub ballad, Kelly fully realized the potential Kavanagh had envisioned back in 1946.

Versions Worth Hearing

Kelly's version remains the standard. Van Morrison recorded "Raglan Road" with The Chieftains — his take belongs with the rest of his Irish shelf here, Brown Eyed Girl and And It Stoned Me as well as his version of Star of the County Down. Sinéad O'Connor, Roger Daltrey, and Ed Sheeran have all sung it: a poem published under a borrowed name in a Dublin newspaper became a song any serious singer eventually has to try.

In our set it stands with the other Dublin literary songs: The Auld Triangle, Behan's Dublin, and Grace, Dublin, love, and loss in 1916 dress. Inside Irish Music's film, The Dubliners, Part 1 — Luke Kelly, is the best video companion to all three.

The fullest single account of the song's making — Hilda's own telling, Kiely's memory, The Bailey, and the air — is The Great Irish Songbook's Raglan Road, and NewsFour's Raglan Road: The Enchanted Way walks the Ballsbridge street itself for readers who want the place.

— hear us play it live (video above).

A Belfast Singer in a New York Studio, March 1967

"Brown Eyed Girl" is a Belfast song but is known as an American standard. Van Morrison was 21, raised on Hyndford Street in east Belfast, and had just come off the road with the Belfast band Them. In March 1967 he was in A&R Studios in New York, recording for producer Bert Berns' Bang Records label. The version of "Brown Eyed Girl" the world knows was the 22nd take. Released that June, it reached No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, and it has never really left the radio since.

That is the Irish story in this song, and it is a real one, even though there is nothing folk about the record: a young writer from east Belfast takes a tune with a calypso lift to New York and comes out with an American standard. Half the songs in this blog are about Irish people leaving. This one is about what one of them made after he left.

Why “Brown-Skinned Girl” Became “Brown Eyed Girl”

The song was written and first recorded as "Brown-Skinned Girl" — the title was a nod to the calypso feel of the music. By the time it was released, it was "Brown Eyed Girl," and Morrison's own account of how that happened is disarmingly unglamorous:

“That was just a mistake. After we'd recorded it, I looked at the tape box and didn't even notice that I'd changed the title.”

You will sometimes read that the original title was about an interracial couple, and that the change was made to soften the song for 1967 America. Treat that as unproven. Rhino — the label that now stewards Morrison's catalogue, and the source for most of the facts in this post — looked into it and calls that reading dubious: it traces to a claim in the Independent, and there is no direct quote from Morrison supporting it. What is documented is the accident on the tape box. What got changed for radio is a different part of the song entirely.

The Line Radio Wouldn't Play in 1967

The verifiable censorship story is in the lyric, not the title. Some stations in 1967 would not play a single with the line "making love in the green grass" in it, so they were sent a doctored version with an earlier line — "laughin' and a-runnin', hey hey" — pasted over the offending one. If you grew up hearing a slightly odd repeat in the third verse on oldies radio, that is why.

The other hard fact of the record: Morrison signed his Bang deal without legal advice, and he has said he never received royalties from "Brown Eyed Girl." It colours how he talks about the song to this day — asked about it by TIME in 2009, he said: "I've got about 300 songs that I think are better." Three hundred songs better than the one the whole world can sing.

The Belfast Place Hiding in the First Verse: Down in the Hollow

One detail ties the standard back to Belfast. The first verse opens "down in the Hollow" — and the Hollow is a real place, a green hollow in Bloomfield, east Belfast, about 200 metres from the house on Hyndford Street where Morrison grew up. The brown-eyed girl, the green grass, the days of skipping school and singing on the way home: the song's whole sunlit world is a Belfast childhood remembered from a New York studio. The standard is American. The memory in it is from about as far east in Belfast as you can get without falling in the lough.

We play it the way we play every song in this blog — and the other Van Morrison post here, And It Stoned Me, is its companion: the same Belfast writer, a few years further on, singing about a childhood fishing day instead. Two songs, one city, both carried all over the world.

For the full record — the session, the title, the radio edit, the royalties — the best single source is Rhino's own history: "Single Stories: Van Morrison records 'Brown Eyed Girl'".

— hear us play it live (video above).

"I'll Tell Me Ma" is a children's singing game from Belfast — also known as "The Belle of Belfast City" and "The Wind" — that grew up into a pub song. Children sing it in a ring, holding hands, with one child in the centre. Adults sing it in pubs, at speed, with the whole room on the chorus. It is the same song in both places, and that is exactly the point of it: this is how Irish tradition actually survives — not in books, but in schoolyards and community gathering places, passed from person to person.

The girl at the centre of the song is the belle of the city, and every child playing the game wants to be her, or wants to be chosen by her. The stakes are playground stakes, which to a child is everything.

Roud 2649: A Song Collected From Schoolyards Since the 1800s

The song has its papers. It is No. 2649 in the Roud Folk Song Index, the standard catalogue of English-language folk songs, and it was collected in various parts of Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth century and again in collections made just after 1900. "Collected" here mostly means written down from people singing it — and the people singing it were usually children, or adults remembering what children sang.

Many of the songs we perform were preserved by collectors, singers, and eventually record companies. This one was preserved by the playground, the least reliable and most durable archive there is. Our post on Mary Mack is about its natural partner — another children's favourite, a clapping game in Scotland, about courting and marriage sung by kids playing at the grown-up world. Rattlin' Bog is the other post here built on a cumulative song children learn by repetition.

How the Ring Game Works

The children form a ring and sing, with one child standing in the centre as the belle. The song describes her — handsome, the belle of the city — and runs through who she will and will not marry. Then comes the line the game turns on: "please won't you tell me who is she." At that moment the child in the centre names another child, and the named one takes the centre, and the game starts again.

The naming is the whole mechanism. It is how a child gets chosen in front of everybody, and how the song keeps itself going without an ending — there is always another belle.

Belle of Belfast City — or Dublin, or London

In Ulster, the chorus names Belfast. Elsewhere the same song names Dublin — The Dubliners and the Young Dubliners sing "Belle of Dublin City" — and other versions name the "Golden City" or London. This is not an error but the song working as intended: folk songs move from city to city and get made local, and possessiveness about the home version is part of the tradition.

We use Belfast because this is the version we heard most growing up. It is also nice because most of our Belfast songs show the city in a grimmer light. This one shows Belfast children singing and playing in a schoolyard and you'd never know if they were Protestant or Catholic.

The Archive Irish Children Wrote Themselves

In 1937–39, under a scheme run by the Irish Folklore Commission, schoolchildren across Ireland collected the lore of their own districts — including the games they played: skipping rhymes, counting-out rhymes, and ring games like this one. The result, the Schools' Collection, is now digitised at dúchas.ie. Songs like this one survive because children helped write their own play down.

One grown-up footnote: Van Morrison, a Belfast man, recorded "I'll Tell Me Ma" with The Chieftains on their 1988 album Irish Heartbeat, and it was released as a single — a rock singer going back to a schoolyard song from his own city.

To explore: UCD's Games I Play is the doorway into the Schools' Collection, with photographs of Dublin children playing in the 1930s; dúchas.ie lets you search the Collection's games from your own county; and Roger McGuinn's Folk Den page has the lyrics, chords, and the game in one place. Our own Short of the song has travelled further than any of our full videos of it.

— hear us play it live (video above) or hear it at an upcoming live show. We usually start a set with it!

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

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

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

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

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

Patrick Fleming, 1650: The Broadside Behind the Song

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

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

What Jenny Did to His Pistols

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

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

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

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

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Raggle Taggle Gypsy" tells one of the oldest stories in ballad singing. Three gypsies come singing at a great lady's door. She hears their music, leaves her husband, her house, and her feather bed, and goes off with them — in the best-known telling, with Johnny Faa. Her lord rides after her. She refuses to come back.

The ballad is Child Ballad 200, "The Gypsy Laddie," collected across Britain, Ireland, and the United States. In Scotland, the story grew a set of names: the lady became Lady Jean Hamilton, wife of the Earl of Cassilis, and the gypsy became Johnny Faa. People searching for the Raggle Taggle Gypsy true story are asking about those names — the legend, the evidence, the real Johnny Faa, and the Irish Traveller singer who carried the song into the modern Irish repertoire.

Is the Countess Story True? What the Evidence Says

The Cassilis story is a legend, and the ballad scholarship says so plainly. Francis James Child, who catalogued the ballad, wrote in his notes that "there is little evidence to suggest that the ballad has any historical basis" for the Cassilis elopement. Letters from the Earl of Cassilis to Lady Jean, written after the alleged events, show, in Child's summary, "a high degree of mutual affection and confidence." A husband does not usually write like that to a wife who has just run off and ruined him. Later versions of the ballad, from the eighteenth century onward, attached the Cassilis names to a story that had been sung without them.

That does not make the names worthless. Ballads collect names the way they collect verses — a good story finds a real house, a real earl, and a real lady, and local memory keeps the fit. The elopement is the ballad's story, the Cassilis names are Scotland's addition to it, and the surviving letters point the other way.

The Real Johnny Faa and the Roma in Scotland

Johnny Faa was real, and his people's story in Scotland is harder than the ballad's romance. In 1540, James V recognized John Faa as "lord and earl of Little Egypt" — Little Egypt being the period term tied to the Roma, from which the word "gypsy" itself derives. Within a lifetime, the position reversed completely. By 1609 the Roma were ordered out of Scotland, and in 1611 men named Faa were hanged.

So the figure the ballad turns into a charming singer at the castle door belonged to a community that Scotland first recognized and then persecuted, in the same broad period the ballad comes from. The song keeps the music and the freedom. The record keeps the rest.

The word in the title needs its plain meaning too. "Raggle taggle" is shabby, roughly dressed — the gypsies arrive looking like nothing, and leave with the lady of the house. The ballad's tension runs on that contrast: feather beds on one side, the road on the other, and the lady choosing the road.

In America the ballad became "Gypsy Davey." Versions collected in Virginia keep the lady's refusal to return and drop the Scottish hangings — the love story survives the crossing and the hard context stays home.

John Reilly, Planxty, The Waterboys: How It Became an Irish Standard

The song's Irish life runs through one singer. John Reilly was an Irish Traveller singer from County Roscommon, and his singing is the source behind the version that reached the modern folk world. Planxty took up Reilly's version, and the Waterboys' version is, in turn, the Planxty version of the John Reilly version — a chain you can name, singer to singer.

That chain matters for Ireland. The community in the Irish telling of this story is Irish Travellers, and the song survived in Ireland because a Traveller singer kept it. The Waterboys put "Raggle Taggle Gypsy" on their 1990 album Room to Roam, and their whole folk period was nicknamed the "Raggle Taggle Band" after it — a Scottish ballad naming a rock band's Irish years.

In our own set, Fisherman's Blues is the Waterboys' home post, and this is the song that named their folk era. Caledonia is the honest pair to this post: Scottish first, Irish by adoption. Mary Mack is another song about a woman and other people's plans for her marriage, and Black Velvet Band is another ballad where a woman and an outsider's world change the course of a life.

Irish Music Daily works through the same question searchers ask, in Is Raggle Taggle Gypsy based on a true story?, and the Ballad Index entry for Child 200 collects the sources and recordings for readers who want the full trail.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Fisherman's Blues" is the title track of the Waterboys' 1988 album, and it marks one of the great changes of direction in modern folk-rock: a Scottish band that went to Ireland, fell in with Irish musicians, and came out the other side playing like a session band. Mike Scott, the band's frontman, has summed the story up himself: "Some cynics claim that Scotsman Mike Scott gave Irish music back to the Irish… it was the Irish tradition that influenced him."

That is the Irish story in this song. Ireland was not the Waterboys' home, but it was the place the music was — and Scott went to find it, the same pull that keeps traditional sessions alive wherever Irish music is played.

How the Waterboys Went Irish: Dublin, Wickham, and Spiddal House

The turn began with a fiddle player. Steve Wickham joined the Waterboys in 1985 and brought Scott into Dublin music circles. Scott moved to Ireland in 1986, and the recording that followed was not a single set of sessions but a two-year trawl: sessions at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin from January to March 1986 and again from March to August 1987, a December 1986 session in San Francisco, and finally the Spiddal House sessions in 1988, in the Galway village of Spiddal, where Scott was living. The Spiddal sessions produced the whole second side of the album.

Scott's own count of it is the best summary: "We started recording our fourth album in early '86 and completed it 100 songs and 2 years later." One hundred songs went into the making of Fisherman's Blues, and the album that came out in October 1988 wore its making openly — Irish traditional musicians in the room, tunes between the songs, and a band playing like a session that happened to be recorded.

The title song led the change rather than following it: the Waterboys performed "Fisherman's Blues" on the television show The Tube in 1986, two years before the album, as the first public showing of the new direction. And the folk turn was no retreat from the audience — Fisherman's Blues became the Waterboys' best-selling album, reaching No. 13 in the UK.

What "Fisherman's Blues" Is About: Out of Dry Land

The song itself is plain in its longing. The singer wants out — out of dry land and, as the opening puts it, its bitter memories; out of the city and the working life he has, and into a fisherman's life on the water. There is a love in it too — he wants the woman with him, working and travelling beside him, "travelling on" together. But the engine of the song is the trade itself: exchange the shore for the sea, and a cramped life for an open one.

It is the oldest bargain in the sea songs. Our other post in that world, Fiddler's Green, is sung by an old fisherman looking back at the same choice from the far end of it. And the traditional world the Waterboys stepped into in those sessions is the world of songs like Raggle Taggle Gypsy, which sits in our set too.

The 100-songs fact is our favourite part of the story, and we tell the short version in our 60-second Short on the Spiddal sessions.

To read more: Wikipedia's Fisherman's Blues page lays out the full session history — Windmill Lane, San Francisco, Spiddal House — and the album's chart performance.

— hear us play it live (video above).

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

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

A Glasgow Weaver Ruined by Drink: The Calton Weaver

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

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

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

How Nancy Whiskey Got to Derry and Hartford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— hear us play it live (video above).

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

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

Jimmy MacCarthy: the Singing Horseman from Macroom

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

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

Christy Moore's 1984 Title Track

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

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

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

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

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

A Song About Emigrating and Being Left Behind

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

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

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

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Jackie" is the opening track of The Lion and the Cobra, the 1987 debut album by Sinéad O'Connor, a singer from Dublin. It is a shore lament in the old style: a woman waits for her sailor, Jackie, and is told he has been lost at sea. She refuses to believe it. He knows that sea like the back of his hand, she says. He will come back.

Then the lyric turns. The woman doing the waiting gives her own account of herself: she has been dead for twenty years, washing the sand with her ghostly tears. The narrator is the ghost. She is not waiting on the shore because she cannot leave it. She is part of it.

A Ghost Story Opens a Debut (1987)

Every song on The Lion and the Cobra was written or co-written by O'Connor herself, and several of them — including this opener — were written when she was still a teenager. She was twenty when the album appeared in 1987. Consider what that means as a career decision: an unknown singer, given a debut album, opens it not with a single or a showcase but with a slow ghost ballad sung by a dead woman.

AllMusic's review of the album singles out "Jackie" alongside "Troy" and "Jerusalem" for their "hushed, quiet intensity," on a debut it calls a sensation on its 1987 release. The quiet was the statement. Before the hits and the controversies that made her famous worldwide, the first thing Sinéad O'Connor chose to sing in public was this.

The Women Who Waited: "Jackie" and the Old Shore Ballads

Nothing about the song's furniture is new, and that is deliberate craft from a teenage writer working inside a tradition. The waiting woman. The messenger with bad news. The refusal to accept it — she argues with the news the way the women in the old ballads argue, on evidence: he knew that sea too well to be taken by it. And the shore itself, the strip of ground between the living and the dead, which is where this whole family of songs is set.

The women who stayed ashore while the men went to sea run through this blog's sea songs. Fiddler's Green is the old tradition's answer to the danger — a paradise waiting for sailors who never came home. In "Jackie," the sailor simply never comes back, and the paradise is not his; the waiting is hers, forever. Leave Her Johnny is the shore side of the same story sung from the ship, and Ride On is Christy Moore's parting song — the living man's goodbye, set against this dead woman's refusal to say it.

One distinction to keep clean: "Jackie" is not a traditional ballad, and no traditional source for it has been established. It is an original song by an Irish writer who had absorbed the old ballads deeply enough, young enough, to write a new one that behaves like them. The Irish angle of this post is the singer and the tradition she was working in — nothing more, and it does not need to be more.

Why We Play It

We play it because a pub set needs one moment of genuine quiet, and because audiences who know O'Connor only from one famous song discover that the first track she ever released was a ghost story about the sea. A Dublin teenager wrote the women-who-waited tradition a new verse. It holds a room.

To read further: the New York Review of Books' appreciation of O'Connor is the strongest short piece on her as a songwriter, including "Jackie" written in her teens, and Grammy.com's five essential tracks is the way in for readers who know only the famous one. On the supernatural inside Irish song generally, Inside Irish Music's Ghosts, The Banshee, Fairies covers exactly this post's ground.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Black Velvet Band" is a transport ballad: a love story that ends, within a few verses, in a courtroom and a one-way trip to Van Diemen's Land. A young apprentice meets a woman wearing her hair tied back with a black velvet band, falls for her, and pays for it with seven years on the far side of the world.

It is one of the most singable songs in our set, and one of the most widely travelled. It is also worth saying plainly: there is no single true story behind it. It is a broadside ballad — a fiction sold cheaply on printed sheets — and its history is the history of the song itself, moving between England and Ireland and out to Australia with the convicts whose sentence it describes.

A Gold Watch in His Hand: The Story in the Song

The plot turns on one object: a gold watch. The woman steals it from a passing gentleman and puts it into the apprentice's hand. He is arrested, and the next morning he is in court with the stolen watch as the evidence against him. The judge gives him seven years' penal servitude in Van Diemen's Land.

The detail matters because it is what makes the ballad work. The apprentice is not a thief and not a rebel — just a working lad whose only crime was being flattered by a pretty stranger's attention, and the system does not care. The chorus carries his warning — beware of the pretty colleens — but the verses are sadder than the warning suggests: he still describes the woman in romantic terms even as he counts the cost of meeting her.

The song is catalogued as Roud 2146. Broadside versions set it on the Ratcliffe Highway in London, while collected versions place it in London, Belfast, Tralee, Bedfordshire, and Dunmanway in County Cork. The story stayed the same; the hometown changed to wherever the singer was standing.

Seven Years in Van Diemen's Land: What Transportation Meant

The sentence in the song was a real one, handed down in real courts for exactly this class of offence. Between 1788 and 1868, more than 162,000 convicts were transported from Britain and Ireland to Australia, and about a quarter of them were Irish. Van Diemen's Land alone — now Tasmania — received some 67,000 convicts from England and Ireland between 1803 and 1853.

Seven years was a standard sentence, and for most who received it, it was effectively exile for life: even a convict who served his time rarely had the money for the passage home. The apprentice, transported for a watch he did not steal, stood inside a system that moved tens of thousands the same way.

We sing the other end of that system in Back Home in Derry, where the men in the hold are political prisoners rather than a duped apprentice, and in The Auld Triangle, where the prison is in Dublin and no ship is involved at all. The apprentice's story is the ordinary version of the same machinery: no cause, no rebellion, just a bad night and a judge.

From a Norfolk Farm Singer to The Dubliners: How It Became an Irish Standard

Here is the odd fact at the centre of the song's modern life. The version that made it an Irish standard — The Dubliners' 1967 recording — was adapted from a version Ewan MacColl recorded in 1955 from Harry Cox, a traditional singer and farm labourer from Norfolk, in England.

So the "Irish" version came through an English singer. That is not an embarrassment; it is the normal way this music worked. Songs crossed the Irish Sea in both directions for centuries, and a good ballad belonged to whoever was singing it. The Dubliners took Cox's version, through MacColl, and put it in Dublin accents at pub speed — and from then on it was an Irish song, whatever its route there.

The same year, 1967, the Irish Rovers took the song to a multi-million-selling record in the United States: in a single year, one broadside ballad was carried into the charts by a Dublin band at home and an Irish band abroad. Its closest cousin in our set is Whiskey in the Jar, the other ballad of a young man, a woman, and the law — though that narrator at least fights back.

To dig further: the National Museum of Australia's page on convicts sent to Australia covers the transportation system behind the sentence, and Wikipedia's article on “The Black Velvet Band” covers the song's Roud number, broadside settings, and recording history. Inside Irish Music also takes up this song directly, asking how “The Black Velvet Band” got so popular in Ireland.

— 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).

It is Christmas Eve in a New York drunk tank, and an Irish emigrant is looking back on the life he promised and the one he got. "Fairytale of New York" is the biggest Christmas song in our set, and it contains no tinsel at all — just a couple who came to America with dreams, fell apart, and are still, at the end of it, holding onto each other: “I built my dreams around you.”

The song was written by Shane MacGowan and Jem Finer of the Pogues and released on 23 November 1987, with Kirsty MacColl singing the woman's part. The Pogues were a London-Irish band — second-generation kids playing Irish music in King's Cross pubs — and this is the emigrant Christmas as that generation knew it. MacGowan himself was born on Christmas Day, 25 December 1957, in Pembury, Kent, to Irish parents, and spent long stretches of his childhood with his mother's family in Carney, Co. Tipperary.

How “Fairytale of New York” Was Written: The Bet, the Sailor Song, and Kirsty MacColl

The song took two years to write, and even its starting point is disputed. MacGowan said producer Elvis Costello bet the band they couldn't write a Christmas hit. Accordionist James Fearnley remembered it differently — manager Frank Murray pushing for a Christmas song. Either way, Finer's first version was a song about a sailor in New York missing his wife at Christmas. Finer's wife Marcia called it corny and suggested the plot that stuck: a couple on hard times, arguing their way through Christmas Eve.

The band recorded an attempt in 1986 with bassist Cait O'Riordan singing the female part. She left the band, and producer Steve Lillywhite took the tape home — where his wife, Kirsty MacColl, sang a guide vocal. Her guide vocal is the one on the record. The title came from J. P. Donleavy's novel A Fairy Tale of New York — Donleavy being an Irish-American writer himself.

When we play it, the woman's part is sung by Ryan's wife Janet, who is always up for lending her voice and attitude to it. In 2024 we recorded the song for the Rocking the Suburbs podcast's holiday album Rocking the Holidays — our recording is on the album.

What Is the NYPD Choir? (It Doesn't Exist)

The chorus promises that "the boys of the NYPD choir were singing Galway Bay." There is no NYPD choir, and there never was. For the video, the band used the NYPD Emerald Society Pipes and Drums — who did not know "Galway Bay," so they played and sang the Mickey Mouse Club march instead, and the footage was slowed down to fit. The policeman who throws MacGowan into the drunk tank is actor Matt Dillon.

Inside the song, the drunk tank holds one more of our tunes: the old man sharing the cell is singing "The Rare Old Mountain Dew" when the narrator drifts into the dream that becomes the song. We have a whole post on that one — Rare Old Mountain Dew. The Pogues' other great emigration song is Thousands Are Sailing, and their other song in our set is Body of an American. For the rest of the Christmas cluster, see Pass Me a Pint.

The Lyric Row

Every December, the argument about the song's language comes back, so here are the plain facts. On 18 December 2007, BBC Radio 1 edited the words "faggot" and "slut" from the song — and reversed the decision the same day, after listener criticism. In 2018, RTÉ kept playing it uncensored in Ireland. MacGowan defended the word as belonging to the character singing it, not to himself.

Why an Irish Emigrant Song Became the Biggest Christmas Song

On release, the song reached No. 1 in Ireland, where it stayed for five weeks. In Britain it reached No. 2, kept off the Christmas No. 1 spot by the Pet Shop Boys' "Always on My Mind." It has since become the most-played Christmas song of the 21st century in the UK. And in December 2023, on the day of MacGowan's funeral, it went back to No. 1 in Ireland and was reissued as a charity single for the Dublin Simon Community.

That is the Irish-American story in one song: written by London-Irish musicians, set in New York, sung every December on both sides of the Atlantic by people who know what it costs to leave.

To read more: Wikipedia's Fairytale of New York page has the full history and chart record. The Great Irish Songbook tells the song's story, and Irish Around The World traces MacGowan's Kent and Tipperary roots and the song's yearly return.

— hear us play it live (video above).

Start with the honest line: "Jolene" is a Tennessee song by a Tennessee writer. It is not Irish, and this post will not dress it up as Irish. We were playing it in Maryland pubs before Beyoncé's version arrived in 2024 — that is the band's only claim on it, and it happens to be true.

What the song does have is one of the best-documented origins in country music, told the same way by its writer for decades. Dolly Parton has never been vague about who Jolene was, where the name came from, or what the song cost her to sing.

The True Story: A Bank Teller, a Husband, and a Joke That Became a Song

Parton's husband, Carl Dean, was spending time at the bank — because a red-headed bank teller had a crush on him, and he was enjoying the attention. Parton has told it as a running joke between them: "You're spending a lot of time at the bank. I don't believe we've got that kind of money." The teller flirted; Dean lingered; Parton watched it happen and did what she does — she wrote it down.

Her verdict on the song, given to NPR in 2008, is the key to it: she calls it "really an innocent song all around, but sounds like a dreadful one." Nothing in the lyric is a threat. The singer begs. She lays out everything the other woman has — the beauty, the voice, the pick of men — and admits her own happiness depends on a stranger's mercy. It is a plea from a woman who believes she is losing.

The song was released as a single in October 1973, became the title track of Parton's album Jolene, and was her second No. 1 country hit.

Where the Name Jolene Came From

The bank teller's name is not in the song, and that is deliberate. After a show, a young fan asked Parton for an autograph. Parton loved the girl's name — Jolene — told her "I'm going to write a song about that," and then used the fan's name for the teller, in her words, to protect the guilty.

Two women, neither of them named in anger, share the song: the child who supplied the name and the teller who supplied the story. Parton calls "Jolene" the most-recorded song she has written — the last count she quoted was around 450 recordings by other artists. She has also said she wrote "Jolene" and "I Will Always Love You" on the same day in 1972 — her account, given consistently, and two of the most recorded songs in American music from one day's work is the kind of fact a writer earns the right to tell.

A Plea, Not a Threat: Parton's Jolene vs. Beyoncé's

Which brings the title home. When Beyoncé recorded "Jolene" on Cowboy Carter in 2024, she rewrote it: her singer does not beg Jolene to stay away — she warns her. Same melody, opposite stance. We had been singing Parton's version, the plea, in pubs for years before that, and the difference between the two is the difference between the whole song's meaning: one woman asking for mercy, another issuing a threat. They are not the same song sharing a name by accident — they are an argument about it.

Our set has a small shelf of these American standards. House of the Rising Sun is the other guest post, and Emerald Rain is the band remaking a modern standard its own way. And the stance of Parton's singer — a person who knows the beloved is beyond reach and sings anyway — is one Irish song knows well: Patrick Kavanagh's singer in Raglan Road is in the same position, an ocean away.

An American Cousin: Appalachia and the Ballad Tradition

The connection to this blog is one step back, and it is real. Parton writes out of Appalachia, and Appalachian mountain music was made by mingling traditions — the Smithsonian Folklife Festival describes it as the meeting of English, Scottish, Irish, German, African American, and Native American music, with early collectors noting its closeness to the traditions of the British Isles. The ballads and fiddle tunes crossed the Atlantic with settlers, Scots-Irish and Irish among them, and became old-time and then country music. "Jolene" is a named woman, a story told straight, and a singer who knows she is losing — the Irish ballad's American cousin, recognisable at one remove.

For more: Mental Floss on the two classics written on the same day tells that story reliably; the Country Music Hall of Fame clip, via iHeart has Parton herself on the name and the 450 recordings; and the Smithsonian's glimpse of Appalachian mountain music backs it.

— hear us play it live (video above).

Let's be plain about this one: "Emerald Rain" is not a traditional Irish song. It is Prince's "Purple Rain" with one word changed — purple out, emerald in — and it has become one of our favourite ways to close a night in a pub. The joke is ours. But the phrase it plays on is not a joke at all, and it is older and more serious than most people realise.

"Emerald Isle" sounds like something a tourist board invented to sell postcards. It isn't. It comes out of 1790s revolutionary Ireland, from the same decade as the 1798 Rising, and it was written by a man who helped found the United Irishmen.

Why Is Ireland Called the Emerald Isle?

The first use of "Emerald Isle" in print comes from William Drennan, a Belfast physician and a co-founder of the United Irishmen, in his 1795 poem "When Erin First Rose." Writing about Ireland, Drennan called it "the em'rald of Europe" and addressed "the men of the Emerald Isle." This was political poetry, not scenery writing — Drennan and the United Irishmen were arguing for an Ireland that governed itself, a few years before the rising of 1798 put that argument into the field.

So the nickname everyone now treats as a compliment about green fields started as a statement about a nation. The rain and the grass are real, and Ireland has both in quantity, but the name stuck because a revolutionary poet put it in print, not because the landscape needed describing. That is the piece of Irish history hiding inside our closer, and it is why the song earns its place on this blog.

Prince's “Purple Rain” (1984), One Word Changed

The song we borrowed needs no selling, but it deserves its credit. "Purple Rain" is the title track of Prince and the Revolution's album of 25 June 1984, released alongside the film of the same name. It is a ballad about being with the one you love and letting faith guide you through the end of the world — that is Prince's own explanation of what he wrote. It became his signature song, the one he closed shows with for the rest of his career.

Our change is exactly one word, and it does all the work. Sung in an American accent in an arena, it is Prince's. Sung in a pub, with the whole room on the chorus and "emerald" carrying two hundred years of Ireland with it, it becomes something a crowd can claim as its own. Songs travel and change like that; this blog is full of traditional songs that did the same journey over centuries. Ours just did it faster, and with an electric guitar line everyone already knows.

Why It Works as a Pub Closer

A closer has one job: send the room out together, on a song everybody can sing whether or not they knew it when they sat down. That is what a pub song is for — we make the same case in our post on Irish Pub Song

. “Emerald Rain” does it by borrowing a melody the whole room already has in its bones.

And for a real Irish rain song from our set — a boy, a fishing trip, and a jar of stream water outside Belfast — see Van Morrison's And It Stoned Me, the genuine article next to our borrowed one.

To read more: Mental Floss tells the Drennan story in How Ireland Became the “Emerald Isle”, and Far Out Magazine covers the story behind Prince's “Purple Rain”.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Mary Mack" is a Scottish folk song about a marriage being arranged over the singer's head — and getting faster every time through the chorus. It is a patter song: the singing itself is the show. We play it in an Irish set, and audiences on both sides of the Irish Sea have been singing it for generations, because the Scots and Irish session traditions share a shelf of songs, and this one sits near the front of it.

Mary's parents are making her marry the singer. Nobody in the song seems too upset about it. The comedy is in the arrangement being treated like a business deal, and the tongue-twister chorus being treated like a race.

A Scottish Patter Song, Sung Faster and Faster

"Mary Mack" — also sung as "Mari-Mac" — is a patter song, performed at a rapid tempo that increases toward the end. The chorus piles up similar sounds ("Mary Mack's father's making Mary Mack marry me") until the words are a tongue-twister, and the game is to get through it cleanly at speed, then faster. That is what the song is for: it explains the plot in the verses and turns the chorus into a contest.

A note on the lyric we sing: in the standard version it is the fathers doing the making — "Mary Mack's father's making Mary Mack marry me." We sing the mother version, a documented variant of the same line, which is how the song reached us and how it sits in our set.

The subject underneath the speed is matchmaking — parents arranging a marriage and the couple laughing about it. That world is all over the Irish tradition too. Our post on I'll Tell Me Ma covers the playful Belfast courtship song from the same oral culture, and Caledonia is the blog's other great Scottish song.

Not "Miss Mary Mack": Two Different Songs

This song is not "Miss Mary Mack." That is the American hand-clapping game — described as the most common hand-clapping game in the English-speaking world, with a verse collected in Bolton's Counting Out Rhymes of Children in 1888. The two share a name and nothing else. This Mary Mack is a Scottish courtship song sung by adults in pubs; the other one belongs to the playground. If you came here looking for the clapping game, you have found the other Mary — and she is worth the four minutes.

From Scotland to a Dublin Stage: Makem and Clancy

The best-known Irish performance of the song is by Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy, recorded live at the National Stadium in Dublin and released on Makem & Clancy Concert in 1977 — two of the biggest names in Irish folk music, on a Dublin stage, singing a Scottish patter song as if it had always been theirs. In North America, Great Big Sea's version on their 1995 album Up carried it to a new audience.

That is the honest story of this song on our blog: Scotland wrote it, Irish singers adopted it, and it now lives in both traditions at once — which is how folk songs have always travelled.

The song's form, both father and mother lyric variants, and the Makem and Clancy recording are covered at Wikipedia, "Mary Mack (folk song)".

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Caledonia" is a Scottish song, and we play it straight as one. Dougie MacLean wrote it in 1977, in about ten minutes, on a beach in France — and it has since become so closely tied to Scotland that it is often called the country's unofficial national anthem.

It earns its place in an Irish band's set honestly. The feeling in it — homesickness, written down plainly — is the same feeling that runs through half the Irish songbook. And the way the song travelled, from a Scottish songwriter through Irish singers to the whole world, is how songs in this tradition have always moved.

Written in Ten Minutes on a Beach in Brittany, 1977

MacLean was in his early twenties, busking his way around Brittany with Irish musician friends. Sitting on the beach, homesick for Scotland, he wrote the song in roughly ten minutes.

His own account of what happened next is the best version of the story. He played it to his companions at the youth hostel that night, and, as he has put it, that was the final straw — they all went home the next day.

A song written in ten minutes, about wanting to be somewhere else, was strong enough to end a trip on the spot. That is the whole reputation of "Caledonia" in miniature: it does not argue anyone into homesickness, it just names it, and the naming is enough.

What ‘Caledonia’ Means: Homesickness, Nothing More Complicated

Caledonia is the old Latin name for Scotland, and the song is a letter home to it. The singer counts what he has seen and done on his travels, weighs it against the place he left, and finds the travels wanting. The chorus says it in one line: Caledonia is calling him, and now he is going home.

There is nothing coded in it and nothing to decode. Its power is that MacLean wrote down, in plain words, the exact moment a trip turns into a longing to be back. That plainness is why it sits comfortably beside the Irish emigration songs — and why it is different from them. MacLean could simply go home the next day. The emigrants in a song like Thousands Are Sailing mostly could not. The leaving in Leaving of Liverpool was, for most who sang it, one-way.

The song also stands in an older line. It grows out of an earlier song of the same feeling, "Jean and Caledonia," the way folk songs have always grown — one singer's homesickness handed to the next singer to say in his own words.

And a note on the title this post carries: "Scotland's unofficial national anthem" is a nickname the song is often given, not an official title it holds — other songs, "Flower of Scotland" among them, get called the same thing. The nickname is still fair. Few songs are asked for more, or sung along to harder, by Scots away from home.

How It Spread: Dolores Keane, Frankie Miller and a Lager Advert

The song's road out of Scotland ran partly through Ireland. Irish singer Dolores Keane had success with it in 1988, carrying it to audiences well beyond Scotland years before it became a mainstream standard at home. That is one honest answer to why Irish pub bands play it: an Irish singer helped make it a standard.

In the early 1990s, Scottish singer Frankie Miller recorded it for a Tennent's Lager advert, and that version took it mainstream across Scotland. From there it became what it is now — a song Scottish audiences treat as theirs, sung at gatherings, matches and homecomings, and requested wherever Scots gather abroad.

It pairs naturally in our set with the band's other Scottish anthem post, Auld Lang Syne — two Scottish songs the whole world decided to keep.

Want the full story in MacLean's own words? Wikipedia's article on Caledonia (song) carries his account of the beach, the hostel and the journey home, and Bob Leslie's songwriting analysis of Caledonia works through the Dolores Keane and Frankie Miller recordings in detail.

— hear us play it live (video above).