"Body of an American" is a wake in a song. A dead man's body is carried home to Ireland in a Cadillac, and the people who loved him gather to drink, argue, tell stories and send him off properly. The Pogues released it in 1986 on Poguetry in Motion, an EP produced by Elvis Costello, and it is still sung at wakes — including the police wakes in The Wire.
The man in the coffin is Big Jim Dwyer, a boxer. He never existed. That does not make the song less true: Dwyer stands for a generation of Irishmen who left, made their lives in America, and were carried home at the end.
Shane MacGowan Wrote It — a Son of the Irish Diaspora
The writer matters here. Shane MacGowan was born in Kent, England, to Irish parents. He was a child of the emigration himself — Irish at home, English on the street. The Pogues were a London band singing Irish music with punk energy, and MacGowan wrote about the people he grew up around: the ones who had left Ireland and built their lives elsewhere.
Our post on Thousands Are Sailing covers the leaving itself. "Body of an American" is what comes at the far end of that journey: the leaving is long done, the life has been lived, and now the body is coming back.
Who Was Big Jim Dwyer? The Fictional Boxer Brought Home to Ireland
Dwyer is MacGowan's invention — a boxer who fought his way up in America and whose body is brought home to Ireland when he dies. That is the point. Every Irish family in America had a Big Jim: the uncle or grandfather whose strength built a new life in a hard city, and whose name grew a little bigger every time the story was told.
Dwyer comes home as a "Returned Yank," the figure who was a familiar sight at St Patrick's Day in Boston, New York and Philadelphia — the emigrant who made it in America and never stopped being Irish. The Cadillac that carries him is America's wealth on show in an Irish street, and the local tinkers eye it the way everyone eyes a Returned Yank's success: with respect, and with calculation.
Our post on Fairytale of New York is the other half of MacGowan's America: the emigrants still in the middle of the struggle, arguing in a drunk tank at Christmas. Dwyer's story is that same world, seen from the end of a life that worked out.
The Irish Wake in the Song: Whiskey, Jokes and Lectures on Ancient Irish History
The heart of the song is the wake itself, and MacGowan gives it a timetable. Fifteen minutes in, the whiskey has had its first taste. By five o'clock, in the song's words, every man there is well past sober, and the uncles are giving lectures on ancient Irish history.
That is a real Irish wake, not a stage version of one. A wake was never a quiet, solemn hour. It was a house full of people, food and drink on the table, stories told and retold, arguments, jokes, and pride in the dead person spoken out loud. Grief was in the room, but it shared the room with everything else the person had been.
The wake in this song is the mirror image of the one in our American Wake post. The American wake was the party held for an emigrant leaving alive, because the family expected never to see him again. Dwyer's wake is for the emigrant who came back dead. The send-off is the same either way — whiskey, jokes and stories — and that sameness is the song's argument about how the diaspora handled parting: you marked it together, loudly, and told the stories one more time.
How The Wire Made It Baltimore's Police Wake Song
The song found a second life on television. In The Wire, it is played at the wakes of Baltimore police officers, with the same mix of drink, stories and pride that MacGowan wrote into Dwyer's wake.
That use stuck because it is exact. A police wake in Baltimore runs on the same rules as the wake in the song: the dead man's people gather, the drink comes out, the stories get bigger, and nobody is asked to be quiet about their grief or their pride. A fictional boxer's farewell turned out to describe an American ritual faithfully enough that the ritual adopted the song.
American Songwriter's list of essential MacGowan and Pogues songs puts this one in its proper company, and LitHub's seven Pogues songs that would make great short stories treats Dwyer's wake as the short story it really is.
— hear us play it live (video above).