The emails just keep coming.
Someone from Tokyo wrote to tell me they learned the song from a YouTube video and it's become their favourite Irish tune. A woman in Rio de Janeiro said her father used to sing it and she thought she'd forgotten it, but found it here and now she can sing it with her kids. Someone in Vancouver asked if I had any recordings of it performed live, because they wanted to learn the pacing.
A teacher in Wisconsin — Madison, I think — uses "The Rattlin' Bog" in her Irish heritage unit every year. She said her students love it. One girl did a whole project about the song's structure, how it builds and builds, how it's all about accumulation.
A lad in Melbourne wrote saying his grandfather taught him the song when he was small, and he'd never known it had this whole WEBSITE dedicated to it. He said it made him feel less alone, knowing other people cared about it enough to write it all down.
That one made me tear up a bit, to be honest.
The song is EVERYWHERE. Not just TikTok, not just this site. It's in classrooms and living rooms and bedrooms in a hundred different countries. It's being passed down and picked up and discovered and rediscovered, and people are WRITING TO ME about it.
I never thought about the Bog like that when I started the site in 2002. I just thought it was a funny song about a chain of objects on a tree. I didn't think about it as something that MATTERS to people. Something that connects them.
But apparently it does. Apparently it really does.
Slan go foill,
BogLord2002