Right. So a woman emailed me last month — Bríd, lovely woman, retired teacher from Newry — and she was a bit cross with me. Not properly cross. The polite kind. She'd seen the song over on the songbook and she wanted me to know that I'll Tell Me Ma is NOT a pub song. It's a children's song. Her granny taught it to her in a school yard in 1956 with the hand-claps and everything, and it has no business being roared out by grown men holding pints.
And here's the thing, lads. She's right. And she's also completely wrong. And that contradiction is the whole reason I love this song.
Let me back up.
Before I'll Tell Me Ma was a session staple, before The Dubliners and Van Morrison and half the trad bands in Ireland gave it the big finish treatment, it was a game. A literal game children played in the street. You know the kind — one wee one stands in the middle of a ring while the rest of them circle round and sing, and the words tell the story of who fancies who. "She is handsome, she is pretty, she is the belle of Belfast city." The child in the middle picks someone. Round goes again. It's a courtship game dressed up as a rhyme, and it was played all over these islands, not just Ireland.
That's the bit people miss. The melody and the structure are a folk PROCESS, not a fixed song. The version we sing now — Belfast city, the boys all fighting for her, the knocking at the door — that crystallised in Belfast, but cousins of it turn up in England and Scotland under different names with different towns swapped in. "Belle of London city." "Dublin city." Folklorists have been collecting variants of these singing games since the late 1800s. Alice Bertha Gomme wrote two enormous volumes of British singing games back in the 1890s and there's a heap of this courtship-ring stuff in there. So when Bríd's granny taught it to her in '56, she was passing on something that was already old then. (How old, nobody can say for certain. Folk songs don't come with birth certs. I've said this a hundred times and I'll say it a hundred more.)
So how does a clapping game end up being the thing a fiddle band plays to bring the house down at one in the morning?
Honestly? The same way EVERYTHING in this music ends up where it ends up. Somebody heard it, loved it, and brought it into the session. The big folk revival of the 1960s hoovered up an enormous amount of children's and street material precisely because it was simple, singable, and everyone half-knew it already. That's gold for a pub. You don't need to teach the room a song they learned at age six. They already have it in their bones, even if they think they've forgotten it.
And the structure is just PERFECT for a crowd. Verse, then that chorus that goes up a gear — "I'll tell me ma when I go home, the boys won't leave the girls alone" — and the whole thing builds and speeds and by the end you're flying. It's got that same engine as the songs I bang on about all the time. Repetition. Build. A chorus that gives everyone a job. (Regular readers know I cannot shut up about songs with a job for the crowd. The bog is my whole personality at this stage.)
Here's the bit that actually gets me, though.
I've watched I'll Tell Me Ma sung by seven-year-olds in a yard, all hand-claps and giggling and someone always getting the words wrong. And I've watched it sung at a wake. Same song. SAME exact song. And both were right. The children weren't doing a junior version of a pub song. The drinkers weren't ruining a kids' song. They were both holding the same thread, just at different ends of it. That's not a flaw in the song. That IS the song. It was built to survive being passed from a granny to a child to a fiddler to a fella three pints deep, and to mean something a little different each time, and to not break.
Which is exactly why it's gone down such a treat in schools, by the way. A teacher in Galway — different teacher, not Bríd — wrote to me to say her class learned it the same week they learned the bog, and that the two songs together taught the kids more about how folk music actually works than any worksheet could. The bog teaches them cumulative building. The Ma teaches them that a song can have a thousand homes. I wrote a bit more about the schools that are singing the bog if you want the longer version, and there's a fierce overlap with what's going on in I'll Tell Me Ma.
So to Bríd, and to everyone who's ever told me a song "isn't" a pub song or "isn't" a children's song — you're both keepers of it. The yard and the snug are the same room with different lighting. The song doesn't mind. It never has.
Go and learn it. The proper words and a wee bit on how to sing it are over in the songbook. Teach it to a child if you've one handy. Roar it in a pub if you don't.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin' the cat was asleep on the windowsill while I wrote this and I swear he started purring on the off-beat when I hummed the chorus to test the rhythm. Probably a draught. Probably.