"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!

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

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

Not Traditional: George Millar Wrote It for the Irish Rovers

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

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

Back in Belfast Town: The Song, Verse by Verse

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

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

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

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

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

Emigrants Singing Home: Ballymena to Toronto

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

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

— hear us play it live (video above).

"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).