Most emigration songs were written long after the leaving. "Thousands Are Sailing" was written in 1988, by a member of The Pogues, about people who were still leaving — and it treats a man who sailed in the age of the coffin ships and a man who flew to New York in the 1980s as characters in the same song.

That is why it works as an anthem. It is not about one wave of emigration. It is about the pattern itself.

Philip Chevron (Born Philip Ryan) and the Pogues, 1988

The writer was Philip Chevron, born Philip Ryan in Dublin in 1957; "Chevron" was taken from the American record label. He wrote the song for The Pogues' 1988 album If I Should Fall from Grace with God, and sang it himself.

Its standing among Irish listeners was summed up in his obituary: the song "struck such a potent chord of authenticity with Irish audiences that it has already passed into folklore," and it is often performed by singers who wrongly assume it is traditional. A song written in a recording studio in the 1980s got mistaken for a folk song within its author's lifetime. That almost never happens, and it happened because the verses are built out of real emigrant detail.

Verse by Verse: Ellis Island, the Coffin Ship, and Broadway

The first verse is a ghost story. "The island it is silent now" is Ellis Island, closed and empty; the torch is the Statue of Liberty's. The man answering the immigration officers' questions is dead: "On a coffin ship I came here, and I never even got so far that they could change my name." The famous Ellis Island story is clerks renaming the arrivals. Chevron's narrator never reached the desk. He is the Famine-era emigrant underneath the whole song, and the modern verses are built on top of him — the same ground as our posts on the American Wake and the Leaving of Liverpool.

By the third verse the emigrant is alive and in modern New York, dancing where Brendan Behan and George M. Cohan made their names before him — the playwright and the songwriter standing for the two things the Irish built in American culture: its stages and its songs. And between the verses comes the second chorus, where "the hand of opportunity draws tickets in a lottery." That line is widely read as the 1980s world of the undocumented Irish in America and the visa lotteries they pinned their hopes on, mailing postcards home "from rooms the daylight never sees." Chevron never spelled it out; that reading is the audience's, and it fits the decade the song came from.

"The Land That Makes Us Refugees": The Chorus That Changes

The chorus does not change its words. It changes its meaning. Sung after the ghost's verse, "thousands are sailing" is the Famine exodus. Sung after the Broadway verse, it is last year's flight out of Dublin. The phrase "the land that makes us refugees" lands on Ireland and America at once — the place that pushed them out and the place that took them in and still kept them strangers.

That double vision is the same one in Fairytale of New York, the Pogues' other great New York emigrant song, and in Body of an American, where the New York Irish gather around a boxer's coffin. Chevron's song is the wide shot of that whole world. Here's a Short clip of us playing it.

The last word on the song belongs to its writer's ending. At Philip Chevron's funeral in October 2013, his coffin was carried out of the church to "Thousands Are Sailing." The fullest single account of the man and the song is Deep Roots Magazine's obituary, and Song Bar's verse-by-verse reading walks the Ellis Island and coffin-ship detail line by line. For the world the song's characters landed in, Inside Irish Music's Where Immigrants Forged One of America's Most Popular Music Genres tells how Irish immigrants built American music.

— 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).