Right. So a fella emailed me last week — schoolteacher up in Sligo, lovely email, two paragraphs of compliments and then ONE actual question buried at the bottom like he was embarrassed to ask it. And the question was: "What other songs are like the Rattlin' Bog?" And I started typing a reply and forty minutes later I had to stop myself because I'd written, no word of a lie, the better part of an essay. So. Here's the essay. Hello Brendan if you're reading.
A cumulative song is the family the Rattlin' Bog belongs to. That's the technical word for it — cumulative — and it just means the song builds. Every verse keeps everything that came before it and then adds one more thing on top, and you have to sing the whole tower back down again, in order, getting faster, until either you nail it or you fall apart laughing. That's it. That's the whole genre. And I will defend it to my grave as the BEST kind of song, because it does a thing no other song does: it turns a room full of strangers into a team with a shared problem to solve. The problem being: don't be the eejit who forgets the order.
People think the Bog invented this. It did not. It's an old, old idea, and it's everywhere, which is the part that still gets me. You'll find versions of it in nearly every language I've ever gone looking in. Same trick, different feathers.
So let me actually answer Brendan. Here are the great ones.
Green Grow the Rushes O is the one I'd put right beside the Bog, maybe even ahead of it on a good day (don't tell the Bog I said that). It counts UP to twelve — "I'll sing you one, O" — and it's stuffed with this gorgeously strange half-religious, half-pagan imagery that nobody fully agrees on the meaning of. The lily-white boys, the rivals, the April rainers. Nobody KNOWS, lads, and that's the magic of it. You can sing the thing your whole life and never get to the bottom of what it's about, and somehow that doesn't matter a bit. It's a counting song the way the Bog is a building song. Different machine, same joy.
Then the obvious one. The Twelve Days of Christmas. Everyone groans because they think they're too cool for it, and then it's the 23rd of December and they're four pints deep absolutely BELLOWING about five gold rings and pointing at each other for the partridge. The Twelve Days is the most popular cumulative song on earth and it's almost a bit unfair, because it had Christmas doing the marketing for it. But strip the tinsel off and it's the exact same engine as the Bog. Add a thing. Keep the things. Sing them all back. Don't drop the lords a-leaping.
And then — and this is the one I love telling the kids about — There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. Which is a cumulative song that's secretly a horror story for five-year-olds. She swallows the fly, then a spider to catch the fly, then a bird, a cat, a dog, a cow, and you can see exactly where this is going, and you sing the whole grisly chain back every verse, faster and faster, until "perhaps she'll die." Which, spoiler, she does. It's gas. It's morbid. Children adore it. It is, structurally, the Rattlin' Bog with consequences.
There's loads more if you go digging. The Barley Mow, which is a drinking song built the same way and gets impossible after about the fourth round (on purpose). Old MacDonald, which is cumulative if you sing it right and a lot of people don't. Chad Gadya at the Passover seder — same idea entirely, a kid, a cat, a dog, all the way up. The trick is genuinely ancient and genuinely global and I find that fierce comforting, honestly. Humans have been sitting in rooms making each other remember lists for fun for longer than anyone can prove.
So what do they all share? Why does this format STICK when a normal three-verse ballad goes in one ear and out the other?
It's the memory, I think. A cumulative song teaches itself. You don't have to learn ten verses — you learn one new word at a time, and the song hands you the rest back every single round whether you want it or not. By the end you've sung "the tree in the bog and the bog down in the valley-o" maybe thirty times and it's tattooed on you forever. You couldn't forget it if you tried. I've watched people who swore they "can't sing" come out the far side of one of these knowing every word, baffled at themselves.
And it's the stakes. Daft little stakes, but real. There's a cliff edge in every verse. Will yer man remember the order? Will the room speed up faster than the slowest singer can manage? That tension is the whole craic. A normal song you just listen to. A cumulative song you SURVIVE, together, and then you grin at each other.
If you want to see exactly how the engine works, go and read the lyrics of the Bog itself and watch how each verse just swallows the last one. And if you want to fall down the rabbit hole proper, the rest of the songbook is right there waiting. Start with Green Grow the Rushes O. Thank me after.
Anyway. That's my answer, Brendan. Sorry it's longer than your email.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin the cat does NOT appreciate cumulative songs. I tested it. I sang the Bog at her, building verse by verse, and somewhere around the flea she got up, looked at me with what I can only describe as disappointment, and left the room. Critics everywhere.