Twelve Irish Tunes

A St. Patrick's Day playlist

Top of St. Paddy’s Day morning to ya! It wouldn’t be St. Paddy’s Day without some classic Irish tunes in the background while you make corned beef and cabbage or whatever (I don’t know how, personally, I’m just assuming some of you are better cooks than me). So for paid subscribers only, I’ve hand picked a mix of my old and new favorites, including some that are less well known. I’m leaving off a couple obvious ones, like “Danny Boy,” which is great, but you don’t need me to tell you that. I’m also leaving off parody tunes, though I will link Tom Lehrer sending up every dark Irish ballad. Listen at your peril! In a similar vein, the Da Vinci’s Notebook parody of every Irish drinking song is almost perfect, though I’m obliged to note there is an especially nasty joke in verse four. Again, you’ve been warned!

Also, as a proud umpteenth generation Scot, I’m leaving off tunes that really belong to, well, us, even if they were made famous by Irish singers. These include ballads like “The Parting Glass” and “Wild Mountain Thyme,” which, lovely as they are, are not Irish tunes. Now, you may ask, “Great, but what’s Garth Brooks doing on this list?” Next question, please.

Anyway, most of these are real Irish tunes, and wherever possible I’ve looked for the renditions that best capture their soul to me. This means avoiding noughties boy/girl bands, for the most part, with apologies to any Celtic Thunder/Celtic Woman fangirls/boys out there. Though I won’t be able to resist a little High Kings, who were my college crush and so, naturally, superior. Also, if I’m honest, they were my gateway to the vast stores of Irish folk, so thanks guys. You’re still cool.

While I am a musician myself, I don’t claim to be an expert music historian, just a generally nerdy fan of all kinds of music, including folk music, including Irish folk. I’ll talk a bit about the history behind each song and what I like about the performance I selected. Share your own favorites in the comments! Meanwhile, happy listening!

Rocky Road to Dublin, Luke Kelly & The Dubliners

Few tunes are embedded so deeply in the Irish consciousness as this traveler’s tale of woe, written by D. K. Gavan and popularized by music hall singer Harry Clifton. Here’s a nice site collecting some press cuttings about it. There doesn’t seem to be much information about Mr. Gavan, except that he was known as “The Galway Poet.” The tune became an instant standard, famously quoted throughout James Joyce’s Ulysses. In 1968, journalist Peter Lennon chose it as the title for his edgy documentary about the symbiotic relationship between Ireland’s church and state. (Pining for the days of poetry and socialism, Lennon passionately argues that the Irish people have forgotten their own revolutionary spirit and need to start rebelling again. I can’t get excited about the thesis, but this casual pub version of the title track is very good.)

I’ve embedded the definitive version by the Dubliners, led by Luke Kelly, one of the great Irish folk voices. He interpreted the canon with the authority of a man who’d had a working-class upbringing before finding stardom. While many thought he would die of drink, in the end it was brain cancer that took him at 43. This performance was recorded in 1976, when he was only in his mid-30s. Recently, I was reading a little Twitter discourse about how much older celebrities used to look. One can cherry-pick, of course, and nature doubtless plays a larger role here than nurture, but I’ve had the same thought. I’m always struck by this when I look at photos of our old country stars—Hank Williams Sr., Johnny Cash. Life seemed to have etched itself on these men’s faces in a way I don’t see as much these days. Kelly’s face was the same way.

If I Should Fall From Grace, Shane MacGowan & the Pogues

Naturally, no good Irish playlist would be complete without a bit of peak Shane MacGowan, snarling and shrieking like a banshee. (And this is a music video, so the audio is far more polished than any performance he ever delivered live.) Paid subscribers can read an essay I wrote end of last year on MacGowan, where I joke that I have a habit of discovering famous people after they die. Poor Shane was no exception. I talk about a number of his tunes there, but “If I Should Fall From Grace” perhaps most pithily encapsulates the essence of Shane—dark, layered, and uncanny in its timelessness. For anyone else who doesn’t know what “coming up threes” means in that one verse, it’s a grim bit of maritime diction for the number of times a drowning man will surface before sinking.

It would be fair to say that Shane did indeed fall from grace. He wasn’t the only alcoholic in the band, but where his peers eventually followed the normal rhythms of detox and rehab, he insisted on committing career suicide in slow motion. But it’s a testament to his young body of work that he was still remembered and revered long after he had lost the ability to add to it. I loved listening to this RTE Radio interview with Paul Simon about their friendship in Shane’s last years. Very poignantly, Paul takes us back to the day when he first made a little pilgrimage to his fellow musician’s home and simply sat with him, not minding the long pauses as Shane collected his thoughts. Paul wasn’t even sure at first if Shane knew who he was (though in his younger days, Shane had joked about catching a song idea like something floating by in the air, “because if I don’t catch it, it’s going to float on and get to Paul Simon.”) This didn’t deter Paul, who remembered exactly who Shane was.