Here is a thing that took me an embarrassingly long time to notice, and I have been singing this song since before I could spell my own surname. Mursheen Durkin is HAPPY. Genuinely, properly happy. Which makes it nearly unique in the whole catalogue of Irish emigration songs, and once you clock that, you cannot un-clock it.
Think about the company it keeps. Spancil Hill is a man dreaming himself home and waking up gutted. Carrickfergus is a fella who would swim the sea if he could but he can't, so he just drinks. Most of these songs are an open wound set to a tune. And then in walks Mursheen, our man, basically whistling, telling his pal Durkin "goodbye Muiris" (that's what Mursheen is — Muirisín, little Maurice, an affectionate diminutive) and announcing he is off to California to dig for gold. No tears. No wake. He's GRAND.
Goodbye Muirsheen Durkin, sure I'm sick and tired of working, No more I'll dig the praties, no longer I'll be fooled. For as sure as my name is Carney, I'll be off to Californy, And instead of digging praties I'll be digging lumps of gold.
You hear that and you think — right, this man has lost the run of himself entirely. And in a way that IS the song. It's the gold rush as it lived in the imagination of a young lad in a wet field in the West, and the comedy is that he thinks he's swapping the digging of potatoes for the digging of gold, as if it's the same shovel pointed at a better hole. (It is not the same. I think he found this out. The song does not tell us, which is part of why I love it — it leaves him forever mid-dream, boots barely off the boat.)
Now. The history is murky, the way it always is with these, and I'll not pretend otherwise. The California Gold Rush kicked off in 1848, and the song belongs to that wave of fellas heading for the goldfields — though the version most of us know got its big airing through the Johnstons and then Johnny McEvoy in the 1960s, who had a proper hit with it. So a chunk of what we sing is mid-twentieth-century shaping of a much older, looser ballad. The line "Goodbye to all the boys at home" floats around in different forms. Some versions are wordier. The bones are old, the polish is newer. That's just how folk songs work and anyone who tells you they have the One True Original Text is selling something.
But here's the bit I actually wanted to write to you about. The TUNE.
If you sing Mursheen Durkin and then immediately sing The Spanish Lady — you know the one, "as I went down through Dublin City at the hour of twelve at night" — you will get a fright. They're the same air. Or near enough the same that nobody in a session is going to argue with you, and if they do, well, that's a different blog post and possibly a barring order. This is not a scandal, by the way. Folk music is recycling. A good tune is too useful to belong to just one set of words, so it gets borrowed, reshaped, slowed down, sped up, handed round the room like a pint nobody bought. Mursheen and The Spanish Lady are basically cousins who got dressed for different weddings. Same skeleton, different coat.
(I love this about the tradition. I love that a melody can carry a homesick lament one night and a cheeky Dublin chancer the next and not feel the slightest tension about it. The tune is a vessel. You pour the words in. The tune does not judge.)
So why does it matter for us, the Bog crowd? Because Mursheen Durkin is the BEST kind of session song for a singer who is nervous. The chorus is short. The melody is one you half-know already — possibly from a tune you didn't realise you knew, see above — and it's relentlessly cheerful, so the room lifts instead of going maudlin. If you've ever started a Spancil Hill at the wrong end of the night and watched a whole pub deflate, you'll understand the value of a song that does the OPPOSITE. Mursheen is the chaser. Mursheen is what you sing to put the colour back in everyone's cheeks.
I put the full words and a bit of guidance up on the songbook — have a look at Mursheen Durkin for the lyrics and how I'd pitch it. And if you want the other side of the emigration coin, the heartbroken one, Spancil Hill is right there beside it, same county, same boat, opposite mood. Sing the two back to back sometime and you've got the whole emigrant experience in about six minutes: the going, and the longing to come back. I've done it. It wrecks people in the best way.
One last thing, and then I'll let you go. There's a lovely innocence in "instead of digging praties I'll be digging lumps of gold" that I think is the soul of the song. He's not greedy. He's TIRED. He's sick of the praties, sick of being fooled, sick of a field that gives back less than you put in. The gold is just the shape his hope took. And honestly? Good for him. I hope yer man Carney found at least one nugget. I hope he sent something home to Durkin. The song never says, and I've decided that's permission to believe whatever I like.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin the cat has taken to sitting on the printout of these lyrics specifically, not any of the others on the desk, just this one, every single morning. I've decided he's a gold-rush optimist. Mind yourselves, lads.