Right. So somebody on the forum (it was session_newbie_cork, sound lad) asked me last week why a song about a man's FUNERAL is one of the most fun things you can roar out in a pub. And I sat there with the tea going cold thinking, you know, that's actually the whole genius of it, isn't it. Finnegan's Wake. It's a song where a fella falls off a ladder, cracks his skull, dies, gets laid out for his wake — and then at the end of the night a splash of whiskey brings him back to life. And the room is delighted. Of course they are.
Let me tell you the story, because half the people who sing it don't actually clock what's happening in the verses. They just know the chorus and the "whack fol the dah" bit.
Tim Finnegan was a hod carrier. That's a builder's labourer, the poor divil who hauls the bricks and mortar up the ladder for the bricklayers. And the song is very clear that Tim "had a love for the liquor." He'd take a drop of the craythur (that's poteen, or whiskey, the "creature comfort") every morning before work. So one fine morning Tim's a bit full, his head feels heavy, he goes up the ladder, and down he comes. Bang. They carry his corpse home, lay him out nice and respectable, a gallon of whiskey at his feet and a barrel of porter at his head. As you do.
Now here's where it gets gas. An Irish wake is not a quiet sombre thing — or it wasn't, traditionally. It's a party. There's food, there's drink, there's storytelling, there's the body in the room with you the whole time. So Tim's friends and family pile in, and they're grand for a while, all "wasn't he a lovely man" and "didn't he have a beautiful corpse." Biddy O'Brien starts crying. Then Maggie O'Connor says sure now Biddy you're wrong, and Biddy gives her a belt across the gob. And before you know it the whole wake has descended into an absolute SCRAP. A free-for-all. Shillelagh law, as the song says — everyone laying into each other.
And in the middle of the donnybrook somebody flings a noggin of whiskey across the room, misses, and it lands smack on the bed and splashes all over the corpse. And Tim Finnegan — dead Tim — sits BOLT UPRIGHT in the bed and roars out:
"Thanam o'n dhoul, do ye think I'm dead?"
That line. That's the line. People mangle it something fierce so let me sort you out. It's Irish — "t'anam ón diabhal" — and it means roughly "your soul from the devil," a sort of curse, an exclamation. Like saying "well damn your soul, do you think I'm dead?!" Tim's giving out to them for waking him with the very stuff that, it turns out, he could never resist. The whiskey didn't kill him after all. The whiskey brought him BACK. (There's a lovely circular logic to it that I find genuinely beautiful, and I'll not apologise for that.)
It's a music-hall comedy song through and through. It came out of the Irish-American stage in the 1850s or thereabouts — you'll see it credited to the New York and Dublin variety circuit, and like most of these things the "author" is murky and probably half a dozen hands. I'd not swear to a date on a stack of bibles. What I will say is it has the bones of something much older: the comic resurrection, the wake gone wrong, death played for laughs because the alternative is unbearable. That's old. That's deep in the marrow of the place.
And here's the bit that always gets the blank looks. James Joyce — yer man, the Ulysses fella — took the title for his last big mad book, "Finnegans Wake." He dropped the apostrophe (so it's a plural, lots of Finnegans, lots of waking) but the whole engine of the book runs on this song: a man falls, a man dies, a man rises again, history goes round in a circle and starts over. Joyce loved that the song was about a death that isn't permanent. Fall and resurrection, fall and resurrection, the cycle of everything. He built a 600-page riddle on the back of a pub song about a drunk bricklayer. I think that's the single best fact in all of Irish music and I'll tell it to anyone who stands still long enough.
Why am I, BogLord, banging on about Finnegan's Wake on a Rattlin' Bog shrine? Because they're cousins, the same family. The Rattlin' Bog is a cumulative song, builds and builds. Finnegan's Wake is a story song that turns a wake into a riot and a riot into a resurrection. But they share the same DNA: a whole room of people roaring together, the joy of the thing, death and life all tangled up and nobody minding. If you love singing the bog you will love singing this. Trust me. I've watched a function room of strangers become one organism over both.
It's a perfect session song, by the way. The verses tell themselves and the chorus is dead easy — "whack fol the dah, dance to your partner" — so newcomers latch on by the second go-round. If you're building a singalong list it belongs right beside the rest. I keep meaning to write the full thing up properly in the songbook; it's not there yet (I'm slow, sue me), but in the meantime have a poke around and see what's keeping it company. And if your crowd are the sort who'll happily sing about drink and disaster, my best pub singalong songs rundown will sort you for a whole night.
Sing it loud. Sing the "thanam o'n dhoul" line like you mean it. And maybe keep a noggin of whiskey handy, just in case.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin the cat went stiff as a board this morning asleep on the windowsill and I genuinely, for one horrible second, thought of this song. Then she stretched, gave me a filthy look, and demanded breakfast. Resurrected. Like Tim.