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.

The Foggy Dew, Sinéad O’Connor & the Chieftains

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is actually more than one Irish tune called “Foggy Dew,” but this is by far the most popular. A song to warm Peter Lennon’s heart, it’s the only known composition by a young priest named Charles O’Neill, inspired by the doomed Easter Rising of 1916. This insurrection was short, sharp, and brutally crushed by the British, but it foreshadowed independence to come. Writing in 1919, O’Neill wasn’t only thinking about the men who died in Dublin, he was also thinking about their brothers dying much more pointlessly—in his mind—on the fields of World War I. Hence the line, “ ‘Twas far better to die ‘neath an Irish sky / Than at Suvla or Sud el Bar.”

Of course many male singers have covered this, including Luke Kelly, but it’s Sinéad O’Connor’s 90s duet with the Chieftains that’s become definitive. A music video recreating the Rising was shot to go with the studio version (ending with glimpses of bloody revenge as friends of the slain pay a series of “visits”). O’Connor was a massive star at the time, nearly 30, although she looks much younger. Fragile and fierce, she commands the stage like a punk Joan of Arc. There is simply nothing that can be added to or subtracted from this vocal. It is perfection. Another talent lost too young.

Ireland, Garth Brooks

And here’s Garth Brooks, sorry everyone, but look, this song is really quite good. It poignantly complements “Foggy Dew” by imagining how one of those forgotten Irish lads might have died, fighting “someone else’s bloody war.” It’s a great little war yarn, a grand lament in the spirit of “Charge of the Light Brigade,” memorializing “forty against hundreds.” Except in World War I, the grim thing about many such deaths was that sometimes, no one up the chain of command had necessarily “blundered.” Plenty of English boys paid a price for this too, as treated in the English playwright R. C. Sherriff’s searing “Journey’s End.” But this lyric captures the particular bitterness of the Irish boys who “know not why we’re fighting, or what we’re dying for.” Even still, there is glory and honor to be found in the dying.

The Rising of the Moon, Tommy Makem & the Clancy Brothers

In the 50s, these charming, jumper-clad boys were almost singlehandedly responsible for introducing Irish folk music to the American TV-watching middle class. From their base in Greenwich Village, they would go on to inspire emerging folk artists like Bob Dylan. Before they all got together, two of the brothers worked as Broadway actors, while Makem was holding down a grueling job in a New Hampshire cotton mill. When his hand was broken by a steel printing press, he decided to call his friends in New York and suggest they make a record. The title track was this classic rebel tune, “Rising of the Moon,” about the great Irish Rebellion of…[checks notes] 1798. People loved the record, and the rest was history. Liam Clancy, the very charismatic lead brother here, would go on to have a successful solo career after the band broke up. Some songs were written new just for his voice, and he proceeded to make them famous (we’ll get to one later here). As far as I’m concerned, everything he ever touched turned to a pot of Irish gold.

The Real Old Mountain Dew, Rhiannon Giddens

If you want to hear this affectionate ode to Irish moonshine sung the good old Irish way, Tommy and the Clancy brothers have you covered there too. But if you want to hear it Appalachian style, you need to call Rhiannon Giddens and the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Or, if the rest of the band isn’t available, Rhiannon can just do the whole thing on one fiddle in her living room.

This tune is not to be confused with “Good Old Mountain Dew,” an Appalachian folk tune. The slang term seems to have originated in Ireland but made its way stateside in the 19th century. Listening to the Clancy Brothers and the Chocolate Drops back to back feels like listening to a call and response. Though separated by an ocean, all moonshiners spoke a common language.

Finnegan’s Wake, the Irish Rovers

The whimsical story of a quintessentially Irish funeral, in which everyone gets very drunk and starts fighting with everyone else, and amidst all the commotion, the corpse wakes up. Whack fol the da now! Dance with your partner!

Carrickfergus, Van Morrison & the Chieftains

I first heard this tune on the soundtrack to Kenneth Branagh’s autobiographical film Belfast, which soundtrack is more or less one long love letter to Van Morrison. Irish literary icon Brendan Behan apparently wrote one of the verses, but he got the first and third verses from none other than the great actor Peter O’Toole. Though, as this article nerdily explains, it’s often been thought that O’Toole somewhat misremembered them, because they’re a bit geographically confusing. One moment the singer is waxing all mournful and eloquent about being unable to swim the ocean between Carrickfergus (in Northern Ireland) and Ballygrant (in Scotland), then next moment he’s singing about Kilkenny, which is nowhere close to either of these places. Our intrepid nerd suggests a way to clear up the confusion, if anyone is burning to know: O’Toole misheard the name Kilmeny, the Scottish parish in which Ballygrant is located—an obscure name that wouldn’t have meant anything to him, making it plausible that he mistakenly passed it on as “Kilkenny.” But then why would Behan not have caught the slip? We’ll never know! Meanwhile, this is a haunting ballad, well placed at a moment in Branagh’s film where the child protagonist’s parents are agonizingly separated from each other. Of course, the later verses don’t apply, where we realize the speaker is talking about someone dead (and, of course, getting very drunk).

She Moved Through the Fair, Alfred Deller

This tune is another wonderful mix of old collected lyrics and new lyrics added by a collector. (Read the whole neat story here.) It’s a standard with many great interpretations, but contra-tenor Alfred Deller takes the cake for me. Once Deller recorded a standard, he sort of left the competition in the shade.

The Fields of Athenry, Paddy Reilly and Glen Hansard

This tune is by Pete St John, a beloved 20th-century tunesmith who penned a number of classics. “Athenry” is the best known and loved. I’ve embedded a heartfelt pub rendition recorded by some of his friends after his funeral in 2022. Paddy Reilly is the older gentleman in hat and scarf, and you can find videos of his much, much younger self singing this in the 70s. The lyrics tell a tragic tale of the great Irish potato famine, in the voice of a man who desperately steals for his family and is exiled to Australia. Like many Irish classics, it’s become a big sporting tune, which is at once pretty strange and pretty cool. I’m a bit jealous, frankly. They get “Fields of Athenry” while we get…“Take Me Out to the Ballgame”? It’s not fair, I tell you!

Rare Auld Times, the High Kings

This is one of two ballads I’m spotlighting from these lads, in honor of their status as my gateway drug to this music. When they first came on the scene, they looked and sounded so pretty that they got a bit pigeonholed with Celtic Thunder. But they quickly went about proving themselves as more small folk band than glossy vocal group, capably accompanying themselves live without “tracks and stacks.” They also just revived a lot of great songs, including this classic also by Pete St John, who was just too good not to sneak onto this list twice. Baritone Brian Dunphy nicely introduces it for the live Dublin audience here, explaining that it’s a lament for a Dublin that is no more.

There’s a whole history lesson in these lyrics. It’s not just about the loss of landmarks like Nelson’s Pillar or the Hotel Metropole, it’s about the loss of a whole way of life, including whole trades, like the speaker’s old trade of cooperage. “Like my house that fell to progress,” he recalls with a bitter touch, “My trade’s a memory.” The chorus keeps evoking the children’s rhyme “Ring-a-ring-a-rosy,” as if the speaker is haunted by their ghosts. One is reminded of T. S. Eliot’s children in the apple tree, “half-heard in the stillness, between two waves of the sea.”

The Town I Loved So Well, the High Kings

Another big 70s ballad that the High Kings really made their own, this one with lead singer Darren Holden (more polished version here, I just like this particular audience-shot version). This one was written by Phil Coulter, one of Ireland’s last great folk tunesmiths, about his childhood in Derry, North Ireland. Again, this is a lament. The first three verses are nostalgic yet honest, vividly painting the town with all its little glories and sorrows. The song then takes an angry turn with the coming of the Troubles, during which Derry became unrecognizably militarized, a ghost town of “armored cars and bombed out bars,” and “the damned barbed wire” climbing ever higher. Coulter simply laments this without placing all the blame on one side, prompting music historian Stuart Bailie to remark that it was that rare tune both Unionists and Republicans could sing. Remarkably, Coulter was only about 30 when he wrote it. It’s a young man’s song that feels like an old man’s song. It feels like the epitaph of an era. In the end, “What’s done is done, and what’s won is won, and what’s lost is lost and gone forever.”

BONUS: The Dutchman, Tommy Makem & the Clancy Brothers

Sorry again, I just had to include this song which is neither about Ireland nor written by an Irishman. It is, in fact, about a Dutchman, written by an American named Michael Peter Smith. (You can hear him sing it himself and tell the very charming story of how he pitched it to Liam Clancy here.) But it just kind of…sounds Irish, you know? Especially when Liam Clancy sings it. And it’s amazing. So let’s call it a bonus.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!