Here's a song I've been singing for the better part of thirty years and I still could not tell you, hand on heart, what half of it MEANS.
That's not me being modest. That's the actual situation with Green Grow the Rushes O. It's one of the oldest counting songs we have, everyone in a session knows at least the first few numbers, and yet you get a room of people who've sung it a thousand times and you ask them "right, what are the lily-white boys then?" and you get six different answers and four shrugs and one fella who's very confident and also completely wrong. I love it. I love it precisely because of that. A song that keeps a secret from you for your whole life is a rare and precious thing.
Let me tell you how it actually works first, because the structure is the bit I CAN explain.
It counts up to twelve. You start at twelve and you sing your way back down to one, every single verse, like coming down a ladder rung by rung. "I'll sing you twelve, O — green grow the rushes, O. What is your twelve, O?" And then off you go — twelve for the twelve apostles, eleven for the eleven who went to heaven, ten for the ten commandments — all the way down to "one is one and all alone and evermore shall be so." That last line gives me a little shiver every time, I won't lie to you. It lands like a full stop on the whole universe.
Now. If you've spent any time on this site you'll already be twitching, because that's the same engine the Bog runs on. It's a cumulative song — every verse hauls the whole tower back with it. The difference is the Bog BUILDS, it stacks one thing on the last and the count goes up and up, whereas Green Grow the Rushes COUNTS DOWN, it hands you a fixed list of twelve and dares you to recite the lot in reverse without fumbling. Different machine. Same joy. Same cliff edge in every verse where somebody might forget what nine is.
(Nine is "the nine bright shiners," by the way. We'll get to that. Nobody knows.)
So here's the part that's kept folklorists arguing for about two centuries. Some of the numbers are obvious. The twelve apostles, the ten commandments, the seven stars in the sky — grand, that's plain Christian counting, the kind of thing you'd teach a child to drill the catechism into them. There's a theory the whole song started as a teaching aid, a mnemonic, numbers one through twelve pegged to things a kid ought to know. Plausible. Sensible. Boring, almost.
EXCEPT.
Except some of these lines make no sense at all, and they're old, and they sound like they're describing something the rest of us forgot. "Two, two, the lily-white boys, clothed all in green, O." Who? WHO are the lily-white boys? You'll hear they're Christ and John the Baptist. You'll hear they're a leftover scrap of some pre-Christian thing entirely, two figures painted green, which is not a colour you'd dress an apostle in. "Three, three, the rivals." Rivals at WHAT. "The five symbols at your door" — what door, whose door, what symbols. And the nine bright shiners. Stars? Angels? Some say it's a mangling of an older line about the moon. Nobody can prove a single one of these and I find that absolutely gorgeous.
My own pet theory, and I want to be clear this is a Clare publican's theory and not a scholar's, is that the song is a sort of layer cake. There's a Christian layer slapped over the top, neat and explainable, and underneath it there's something far older and weirder showing through where the paint's worn thin. Like a stone wall someone's plastered, and the shape of the original rocks still pushes through. I think the green boys and the rivals and the shiners are the rocks. I think they meant something to somebody once and that meaning fell out the bottom of the song somewhere around the time everyone stopped knowing and just kept singing anyway. Which, when you think about it, is the most folk thing imaginable. We don't keep the meaning. We keep the SONG.
And here's why none of that matters in the room, which is the whole point I'm circling. You do not need to understand Green Grow the Rushes to sing it. You need to remember the order, get faster, and not be the one who blanks on six. That's it. The mystery is a free gift the song hands you to puzzle over on the drive home. In the moment it's pure craic — eight pints, twelve people, somebody losing it completely at "five for the symbols at your door" and the whole table racing the slow ones down to "all alone and evermore shall be so." Then a breath. Then someone says "right, again, faster." Same as the Bog. Always the same. Add a thing, or in this case carry the list, keep it all, sing it back, survive it together.
If you want the full proper version with all twelve numbers laid out, I've written the song up over on its own page in the songbook — go and learn the lot of it, it's the one cumulative song I'd put right beside the Bog, maybe a hair ahead on a good night. And if you fancy seeing the same trick run a hundred different ways across the whole tradition, that cumulative songs piece is the rabbit hole.
Learn it. Sing it. Don't worry about the lily-white boys. They've kept their secret this long. They can keep it a bit longer.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — I sang "one is one and all alone and evermore shall be so" out loud at the kitchen table the other night, just testing the line, and Rattlin the cat — who was asleep on the windowsill — opened ONE eye, stared at me for a long second, and shut it again. I have no idea what that means either. Adds up, for this song.