"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 Rattlin' Bog" is a cumulative song — the kind that builds a list and makes the singers carry all of it, every verse, in order, at speed. It starts with a bog, puts a tree in the bog, a branch on the tree, and keeps going down through smaller and smaller things until the list ends at a flea on a feather on a bird in a nest on an egg in the tree in the bog. Miss one item and the whole room knows.

There is no author to credit and no single correct set of words, and that is not a gap in the record. It is the record. This is a song that exists because thousands of singers kept it going, each adding their own version to the pile. This post pins down what is actually known about it — its index number, its other names, and how it is performed — and answers the question in its first word: what "rattlin'" means.

Roud 129: One Song, 180 Versions, No Correct Lyrics

In the Roud Folk Song Index, the great catalogue of traditional songs in English, "The Rattlin' Bog" is No. 129. Some 180 versions of it have been collected from oral tradition. It travels under other titles too, including "The Everlasting Circle" and "The Green Grass Grew All Around," and it has analogues — songs built the same cumulative way — in French, Italian, German, and Dutch. Its earliest traced form appears as "March to the Battlefield" in Riley's Flute Melodies.

Read those facts together and the song's nature is clear. A written song has an original. This one has a family: 180 collected versions, in several countries and languages, sharing a structure and a chorus and differing in the details. The list of things in the bog varies from singer to singer and place to place. Every version that keeps the build and the chorus is a real version.

That family history is also the song's route into Irish sets and American summers. It has spent decades as a U.S. summer-camp marching song, sung by American kids who mostly have no idea they are singing a song Irish pub crowds claim as their own — and both claims are true, which is what an oral tradition means.

Why It Speeds Up: The Song as a Contest

The performance is the point of the song. The tempo typically rises verse by verse, so the list that was comfortable at the start becomes a genuine test by the end. Often one singer leads the "Now on that…" lines that introduce each new item, while the whole group joins in for the cumulative list and the chorus. The leader's job is to keep the order straight. The room's job is to keep up.

That makes the song a contest disguised as a chorus. The challenge is built in: memory, breath, and speed, all at once, in public. Singers drop items, rooms collapse laughing, and the failure is part of the entertainment rather than an interruption of it. It is one of the few songs in our set where the band is visibly working — guitar and bodhrán holding the tempo steady while the list gets longer and faster and the margin for error gets thinner.

The other songs in our set built on the room joining in explain the same mechanic from different sides. I'll Tell Me Ma survives as a children's ring game, a song kept by being played. Irish Pub Song is about participation as the pub's whole purpose. And Kiss Me I'm Irish is our other closer built on the whole room singing whether they planned to or not.

What "Rattlin'" Actually Means

The first word is the one people misread. "Rattlin'" does not describe a sound. In older Irish-English slang, "rattlin'" means excellent, splendid, lively — a rattlin' bog is a splendid bog. The title is a compliment, not a noise report.

It is a fitting name for the song's own career. A splendid bog, a rare old tree, and a list that has been sung in camps, pubs, kitchens, and sessions, in at least five languages' worth of versions, by people who learned it from other people and passed it on the same way. No author, no original, no finished text — just the build, the chorus, the rising speed, and the next singer stepping up to try the list.

For how the song lives now in American group singing, the USC Digital Folklore Archives' Rattlin' Bog page documents it from fieldwork, and the song's Roud 129 version family is laid out at Wikipedia, "The Rattlin' Bog".

— 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).