There's a certain class of song where you can tell the whole thing went horribly wrong for everyone involved, and you're meant to ENJOY that. Schadenfreude with a chorus. "Courtin' in the Kitchen" is the king of them.
If you've never heard it, here's the shape of the disaster. A young fella — Captain Wilson, our narrator, though "Captain" of what is never made entirely clear — takes up with a servant girl. They do their courting, naturally, in the kitchen of the house where she works. Below stairs, as they say. Where the warm range is and the master is NOT. And it all goes grand for a while. The flirting, the sitting close, the tea probably. And then.
And then her mistress catches them.
That's the engine of the whole song. The mistress, who is not paying her cook to entertain gentleman callers by the fire, comes down and finds the pair of them all cosy, and the roof comes in. Your man gets hauled up before the court. He's charged. There's a trial. He ends up doing time. For courting. In a kitchen. And the whole time he's singing it to you in this bouncy, cheerful, "ah sure it's gas really" tone, like a man telling the funniest story of his life, which from the far side of the prison wall, apparently, it has become.
I will never get tired of that gap. The events are a genuine ruin — lost girl, lost reputation, actual jail — and the TUNE is one of the happiest in the whole Dublin canon. It bounces. You cannot sing it sadly. I've tried. You sound deranged.
Now, where did it come from. Honestly? The usual murk. It's a Dublin street ballad, broadsheet stuff, the kind of thing that got printed up cheap and sold on corners in the 1800s, and you'll see it credited here and there but the real authorship is gone the way most of these are — into the crowd. The version everyone knows now is the one the Dubliners recorded, and a lot of people assume it's THEIRS, like they wrote it, but no — they were doing what they always did, which was taking an old Dublin song and giving it the loud treatment. It was knocking around long before any of them were born. (For the murk-loving among you, that's the same story as half the songbook. Nobody wrote these. Everybody did.)
The chorus is the thing you'll actually remember, and it's the reason this song lives in sessions. It's all "tooral ooral ooral ooral, tooral ooral ay" — pure mouth-music, no words to learn, just NOISE you make with a smile on you. And that's the genius of it for a pub. The verses tell the story, fine, but the chorus is for the whole room. You can be three pints deep and not know a single verse and STILL land the tooral-ooral like you've been singing it your whole life. Because you have, sort of. You just didn't know it yet.
I'll tell you when this one earns its keep. It's late. You've done the big emotional ones already — somebody's wrecked the room with The Parting Glass and there's a fella in the corner actually wiping his eyes — and you need to bring the energy back UP before everyone goes maudlin and home. THAT'S when you start "Courtin' in the Kitchen." It's a reset button. It says: right lads, enough crying, here's an eejit who went to prison for sitting too close to the cook, let's laugh. And it works every time. The room comes back to life on the first tooral.
A word on the courting itself, because younger lads sometimes miss what's even happening. "Courting" here isn't anything scandalous by our standards — it's flirting, walking out, a bit of romance. The crime, in the song's logic, is that she's a SERVANT and he's a gentleman and the kitchen is her place of work, and the mistress's outrage is really about class and propriety as much as romance. That's what makes it sharp. It's poking fun at the whole rigid Victorian Dublin world where two people couldn't have a cup of tea by the fire without it becoming a court case. The song's on the side of the lovers, always. The mistress is the villain. The court is a joke. We're all rooting for the eejit.
Is it a deep song? God, no. It's daft. But daft on PURPOSE, which is its own kind of art. Not every song needs to break your heart. Some are just there to make a roomful of strangers laugh at the same moment, and that's no small thing — that's most of what a session is FOR, really. The big sad ones get the headlines. The tooral-ooral ones do the actual work of keeping people in the room.
If you want to add it to your repertoire, learn the chorus first (you already half-know it), get one verse solid, and busk the rest. Nobody's listening for accuracy in this one. They're listening for the bounce. Give them the bounce.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin the cat does his own courting in the kitchen, in that he sits by the range and yowls at me until I feed him, and frankly the power dynamic is identical. I am the servant. He is the mistress. There is no lawsuit because I always lose.