Right. So you've decided to actually LEARN one of these songs. Good lad. Welcome to the club of people who lie awake at 2am muttering "bird, egg, nest, branch, tree, bog" like a fella possessed.
Here's the thing nobody tells you about cumulative songs. The words aren't the hard part. The ORDER is the hard part. Anyone can remember there's a flea in it somewhere. The trouble is remembering whether the flea comes before or after the wing, and which order you climb back DOWN the chain again, because if you fumble verse nine in front of a full pub you will feel it in your soul for a week. I know. I have felt it.
So. Here's how I actually do it, after twenty-something years of getting it wrong.
The first trick, and the one I'd put above everything else, is hand gestures. I'm dead serious. Don't laugh. Every link in the chain gets a little motion. For The Rattlin' Bog I do a big flat sweep of the hand for the bog (it's wide, it's low, it's a bog). Tree is both arms up like a fool. Branch is one arm off the tree. Twig, smaller. Nest, two hands cupped. Egg, one hand cupped tighter. Bird, a flappy little thing. Feather, a sort of drifting wiggle. And the flea — the flea is a pinch of the fingers, tiny, the CLIMAX of the whole architecture. Your body remembers what your brain panics over. I've watched lads who couldn't tell you the order sober do the whole thing perfect at midnight just because their hands knew the way. The hands are smarter than the head. They don't get nervous.
Second thing. Chunk it. Don't try to hold thirteen items in your mind as one big list, because no one can do that, your brain isn't built for it. Break the chain into little gangs of three or four. Bog-tree-branch is one gang. Twig-nest-egg is another. Bird-feather-flea is the last and best. Learn each gang till it's automatic, THEN learn the joins between them — the bit where one gang hands off to the next. That's where people fall off the cliff. Not in the middle of a gang. At the seam. So you drill the seams specially. "Branch... twig." "Egg... bird." Say those joins on their own, in the car, on the bus, doing the dishes, until they're one word.
(This is the same reason phone numbers come in chunks and not as one long blur of digits. We didn't invent it. We just stole it.)
Breath control. Oh, this is the one that catches everyone, and it's the least romantic bit so people skip it and then they DIE on verse eleven. By the back end of the song each verse is enormous. You're not singing six words, you're singing the whole accumulated tower of the thing, fast, and if you breathed in the wrong place you will hit the flea with no air left in the tank and it comes out as a wheeze. Sad little flea. So work out your breath stops EARLY, while the verses are still short, and keep them in the exact same spots as the verse grows. Same gaps, every time. Your lungs learn it like a track. Don't freelance your breathing at speed. That way lies blue in the face.
Now. The panic move. Because you WILL blank one day. Everybody does, even the ones who act like they don't, and the worst thing you can do is stop. Stopping is death. The whole song collapses if the chain breaks and there's a horrible silence and someone's auntie has to step in.
So here's the recovery. You go BACK, not forward. The genius of cumulative songs is that every verse is a built-in cheat sheet for the verse before it. If you blank on what comes next, you don't strain to find it — you just start reciting the chain you DO know, from the bottom, out loud, in time, "...and the flea on the feather and the feather on the bird and the bird in the egg and the egg in the nest..." and nine times out of ten the next link just falls out of your mouth on its own before you even get there. The momentum finds it for you. The song is literally designed to rescue you. Lean on it. (And if it doesn't come — sing the bit you've got LOUDER and let the room carry the gap. A loud confident wrong is better than a quiet correct, in a session. Conviction covers a multitude.)
A few odds and ends. Sing it through ONCE a day, the whole thing, even when you think you know it — knowing it on Monday is not knowing it on Saturday night, trust me. Picture the actual objects, don't just say words; see the egg sitting in the nest, see the flea on the feather, because the picture is stickier than the sound. And honestly, learn it WITH someone if you can. Two heads never blank at the same instant. One of you always has it.
If you want a few more to practise the technique on, the songbook has the other great cumulative ones in it — the Twelve Days, Green Grow the Rushes O, the Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. Same machinery, different chain. Once you can do one, the rest come fierce quick.
That's it. That's the lot. Gestures, gangs, breath, and going backwards when you fall. Do those four and you'll never lose your place again. (Well. Mostly. I lost mine last March and blamed the pint. We don't talk about March.)
Go on. Go learn one. The bog is waiting.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin the cat has the gestures sorted. Every time I do the "bird" flap she swivels her head like there's an actual bird and gets the head off her at me when there isn't. Gas. She's learned the song better than half the lads at the session and she can't even sing.