A boy is christened David Anthony, but his father calls him William and his mother calls him Pat. That is the whole joke of "The Orange and the Green," and it only works because everyone listening already knows the setup: a Catholic mother, a Protestant father, and a child being raised inside both Irelands at once.

The song tells it as comedy — the christening, the schooling, the two sets of loyalties pulling at one kid — but the divide underneath it is real, and the song has lasted because mixed families lived exactly what it jokes about.

Written in Liverpool: Anthony Murphy and "The Biggest Mix-Up"

The song was written by Anthony Murphy of Liverpool, and it is also known as "The Biggest Mix-Up." Liverpool matters here. It was the most Irish of English cities, the port generations of emigrants passed through or settled in, and the divide crossed the water with them: Liverpool's Orange lodges march every July for the Battle of the Boyne (1690), just as they do in Ireland.

So Murphy was not writing about a faraway quarrel. He had both colours in his own street. A comic song about a Catholic–Protestant marriage lands differently when the two traditions are not abstractions but neighbours, workmates, and in-laws — which in Liverpool, as in Belfast or Derry, they were.

What the Flag's Colours Actually Mean (Meagher, 1848)

The song's title is the flag's. On 7 March 1848, Thomas Francis Meagher flew a tricolour from 33 The Mall in Waterford, and in April 1848 he set out what the colours stand for, in words worth quoting in full: "The white in the centre signifies a lasting truce between Orange and Green and I trust that beneath its folds the hands of Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics may be clasped in generous and heroic brotherhood."

Green stands for the Catholic, nationalist tradition. Orange stands for the Protestant tradition and the followers of William of Orange. White, between them, is the truce — not either side winning, but the two living under one flag. One common question: is it orange or gold? It is orange. The Irish government's own flag guidelines say calling it gold is a misrepresentation.

A Mixed Family Is the Flag in Human Form

Meagher designed a flag about two traditions sharing one country. Murphy's song is about two traditions sharing one house, and one child. William to his father and Pat to his mother, the boy in the song is the white stripe — the truce, walking around in human form, claimed by both sides and belonging to both.

Meagher's own life turned the flag into an Irish-American story as well. He was transported to Van Diemen's Land for his part in the Young Ireland rising, escaped to America, and went on to found the Irish Brigade in the US Civil War. The man who designed the tricolour ended up an Irish-American soldier.

The tune adds one more layer. "The Orange and the Green" is sung to the air of "The Wearing of the Green" — the same melody as our post on The Rising of the Moon, a rebel song about 1798. The comic song and the rebel song are one tune: the divide and the hope of ending it, carried on the same notes. For the other side of Ireland's divisions, see Four Green Fields, and for the same hope stated straight, On The One Road and Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Want the official version? The Department of the Taoiseach's National Flag guidelines give the government's own history of the flag and its protocol. For the tune's darker history, Inside Irish Music's The Deadly History Behind "The Wearing of the Green" covers the air this song shares. And here's a quick Short of us playing it.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Rocky Road to Dublin" tells the story of a young man from Tuam, County Galway, who walks to Dublin, takes a ship to Liverpool, and gets into trouble at every stop. The words were written by D. K. Gavan, known as "the Galway Poet," for Harry Clifton, an English music-hall performer who made the song popular in the 1860s.

The narrator is a character written for the stage, and the song is his story: a migrant labourer leaving home to find work, mocked for his accent and his clothes the whole way, and rescued at the end by men from his own county. Ireland took the song back and made it a standard. It has been in the Irish repertoire ever since.

Written by the Galway Poet for Harry Clifton

Gavan wrote the song for Clifton (1832–1872), a star of the English music hall, who popularised it. That was a common arrangement at the time: Irish writers supplied material, London stages supplied the audience, and emigrants in the audience heard their own journey sung back at them.

The tune is older than the words. Sheet music for the tune was published as early as 1841 in The Dublin Magazine, already described as well known in Ireland. The song is catalogued in the Roud Folk Song Index as number 3012.

The narrator is not travelling for pleasure. In the opening he is "off to reap the corn" — leaving Tuam to find harvest work. That one detail sets the song inside the long Irish story of seasonal labour migration to England.

Tuam, Mullingar, Dublin, Liverpool: The Journey Verse by Verse

In Mullingar, the girls mock his clothes and his accent. In Dublin, his bundle is stolen, and while he hunts for the thief he is mocked again for his Connacht brogue — in his own words, "my Connaught brogue wasn't much in vogue."

He is shipped across in the hold with the pigs and is seasick off Holyhead. In Liverpool the locals mock his Irishness, he starts a fight with his blackthorn shillelagh, and he is losing until other Galway men join in on his side.

Read as a list, it is a comic routine. Read as a record, it is what waited for a young Irish labourer on the road: suspicion in every town, safety only among his own. Our post on Leaving of Liverpool covers the same road from the dock, and Thousands Are Sailing covers the emigrant journey at full scale.

A Slip Jig in 9/8: Why Nobody Can Breathe Singing It

The song is set to a slip jig in 9/8 time, which is the plain reason it is a tongue-twister. The rhythm keeps moving in threes, the lines are packed with words, and there is almost nowhere to take a breath. Singers treat getting through it cleanly as a feat in itself, which is part of why it works as a showpiece — Gavan wrote it for a professional stage performer, and it still behaves like one.

The first-person voice is the other half of its staying power. Like the narrator of The Orange and the Green, the Rocky Road narrator tells on himself as much as on anyone else, and the comedy carries a harder story underneath.

An Emigrant Song Ireland Took Back

A song written in Ireland, for an English stage star, about an Irishman being jeered in England, ended up as one of the most Irish songs in the book. That round trip is the diaspora story in miniature: the material went where the audience was, and the audience was leaving.

Wikipedia's article on the song sets out the Gavan and Clifton history, the 1841 tune printing, and the song's later life, including its appearance in Joyce's Ulysses. For a different journey, History Ireland's essay on Peter Lennon's 1967 documentary Rocky Road to Dublin follows an Irish émigré journalist who borrowed this song's title to ask what Ireland had done with its independence.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Fare thee well to you, my own true love" — "The Leaving of Liverpool" is a farewell song sung by a sailor shipping out from Liverpool for California, promising the woman he leaves behind that he will come back: "when I return, united we will be." It is one of the best-known songs in the folk repertoire, and it survives because one retired sailor in New York remembered it, word for word, more than fifty years after he learned it.

The song is a working sailor's goodbye, not an emigrant's lament — and the port it leaves from gives it its Irish weight anyway.

Collected in New York: Maitland, Tayluer, and the Library of Congress

The song was collected by William Doerflinger from Richard Maitland, a retired sailor living at Sailors' Snug Harbor on Staten Island, in sessions between 1938 and 1940. Maitland said he had learned it around 1885, aboard the ship General Knox, from a singer from Liverpool. His verdict on the song, decades later: "Yes sir, that song hit the spot!"

Maitland was clear about how the song was used on his voyages: it was an off-watch song, a "forebitter," sung for pleasure in the forecastle rather than a working sea shanty. The association with the capstan comes from the second version Doerflinger collected, in early 1942, from Patrick Tayluer at the Seamen's Church Institute in Manhattan. That session was recorded using Library of Congress equipment, and the recordings were deposited at the Library of Congress — where the song sits today because two old sailors sang it into a microphone in New York.

A Sailor's Farewell, Not an Emigrant's Song

The narrator is a professional sailor, and the details in Maitland's version date themselves. He is shipping aboard the David Crockett, under Captain Burgess, bound for California around Cape Horn. Burgess commanded the David Crockett out of Liverpool between 1863 and 1874, and died at sea in 1874. The singer is not leaving home forever; he is signing on for a voyage, and the whole song leans on his promise to return.

That sets it apart from the true emigration songs in our set. The people in Thousands Are Sailing and American Wake were leaving a life, not a berth. This song pairs the other way: with Leave Her Johnny, the homeward-bound farewell sung at a voyage's end.

Liverpool: The Port a Million Irish Left From

The port is the Irish connection. During the years of the Great Famine, 1845 to 1852, over a million Irish people left from Liverpool's shore. For most emigrants, Liverpool was the last ground of the old world they stood on. A sailor's song that begins on that dock, looking back at the shore, carries that history in its setting even though its singer is a sailor who means to come back.

Irish acts made the song a standard at home. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem had a top-10 hit with it in Ireland in 1964 — the story of that band's rise is told in Inside Irish Music's video on the accident that launched the Clancy Brothers — and Bob Dylan adapted it for his early song "Farewell."

The collection history, including the Library of Congress account, is at Wikipedia, "Leaving of Liverpool", and the National Museum of Ireland's Irish Emigration to America — The Journey covers Liverpool's role in the crossing.

— hear us play it live (video above).