"The Night That Pat Murphy Died" — the song is also sung as "Paddy Murphy" — is a Newfoundland song about an Irish wake. Murphy is dead, laid out in the house, and his friends spend the night drinking beside the corpse, playing tricks, and making sure the widow cannot tell what time it is. It is sung as a comedy, and nearly everything in it is a record of what people actually did at wakes.
The song's route is the Irish diaspora in one line: an Irish custom, carried to Newfoundland by emigrants who left before the Great Famine, kept there for generations, and recorded in New York in 1926 by Irish-American immigrants.
A Newfoundland Song About an Irish Wake
The song is often attributed to Johnny Burke (1851–1930), a St. John's songwriter known as the Bard of Prescott Street. No record has been found of Burke writing it, so it is best treated as traditional — a song Newfoundland made its own, whoever first put Murphy's name in it.
Newfoundland's Irish connection is old and deep. Irish emigration there began with the seasonal fishery and became settled emigration from Waterford and the adjoining counties in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. By the 1836 census, half of Newfoundland's population was of Irish birth or descent, and Irish tradition stayed strongest on the Avalon Peninsula. Newfoundland's Irish name is Talamh an Éisc — "the land of the fish."
What Actually Happened at a Wake: Games, Drink and the Corpse in the Room
The song is a catalogue of wake behaviour. Drink is passed all night. Games and tricks go on in the room with the corpse. The whiskey bottle is put on the corpse to keep it cold. The ice is taken off the corpse and put on the beer. The clock is stopped so nobody can tell the time.
Wake games of exactly this kind are recorded in the National Folklore Collection's Schools' Collection: one account, from Castlecoote, County Roscommon, describes young men taking over the kitchen with games while the women kept watch in the room where the corpse was laid out.
One qualification explains the song's tone. The "merry wake" was for an older person whose death was expected. A young or sudden death was waked solemnly, with keening. Murphy's wake is a party because, by the custom's own rules, it was allowed to be one.
How the Wake Crossed the Atlantic Before the Famine
Because Newfoundland's Irish arrived mainly before the Great Famine and the outports stayed isolated, Irish music and custom survived there in early forms. Settlers formed enclaves — St. John's, the Southern Shore, the Cape Shore — some of which stayed almost entirely south-eastern Irish into the 20th century, still singing songs that named places in Ireland.
Our post on American Wake is this song's mirror image: a party the night before someone leaves for America, treated as a funeral because they would not be seen again. Murphy's song is the party the night after someone dies. Body of an American shows the same custom still working in America, at the wake of a boxer, and Fiddler's Green is the gentler version of the same refusal to let death end the night.
Recorded in New York in 1926 by Irish-American Immigrants
The Flanagan Brothers recorded the song on 25 October 1926 in New York, for the Victor label; the session is catalogued in the Discography of American Historical Recordings. Irish-American immigrants, recording a Newfoundland song about an Irish custom, in New York, in 1926 — the whole chain of the diaspora sits inside one record date.
Inside Irish Music's video Newfoundland: The Only Place Pre-Famine Irish Music Still Exists? makes the case for the place this song comes from. The Irish Traditional Music Archive's A Grand Time: The Irish of Newfoundland covers the south-eastern Irish settlements and their songs, Memorial University Libraries' Irish Studies collection documents the Waterford migration and the 1836 census, and the wake games are in the National Folklore Collection at Dúchas.
— hear us play it live (video above).