Right. Let me tell you about a man I will not name.
He came into a session in a pub in Ennis about, oh, fifteen years ago now, and he had a VOICE on him. Big, trained, lovely thing really. And he used it to absolutely flatten every single song. Started one before the previous fella had finished his pint properly. Took the harmony line on songs that don't HAVE a harmony line and invented one. Changed the key of a song mid-verse because it suited his range better, never minding the poor woman on the fiddle who'd already set off in the original. By half ten he was sitting on his own and he genuinely didn't know why.
I think about that man a lot. Not unkindly. He's the reason I'm writing this.
Because here's the thing about sessions, and singers especially — there's a whole code, and nobody ever tells you it, and you're meant to just absorb it by sitting in the corner with your stout for a year or two. Which is grand if you've got a year or two. But people email me asking how to actually DO this without making a holy show of themselves, so. Here's what I'd say. None of it is law. All of it is true.
First and biggest: you do NOT just start singing. You wait. Sessions have a rhythm to them — tunes for a while, then maybe a song, then tunes again — and you have to feel where the gaps are. Usually there's a lull. A tune set finishes, there's a bit of chat, somebody's getting a round in. THAT is your window, but even then you don't barge. You catch the eye of whoever's sort of unofficially running the night (every session has one, even when they swear they're not) and you sort of lean in and go "will I give one?" Soft. And they nod, and the room settles, and only THEN do you open your mouth. If you don't know who's running it, just wait longer. The patience is the etiquette. Honestly the whole thing could be summed up as "read the room and be a bit slow about everything."
When it's not your song, your job is to LISTEN. This is the part that catches singers out, because singers like to sing. If someone else has started a ballad — a proper unaccompanied ballad, the kind where the room goes quiet and you can hear the fridge humming behind the bar — you do not join in. Not the verses. You can come in on a chorus IF they invite it, by the way they sing it, by opening it up, by that little lift of the head. You'll know. And if you're not sure, you don't. Better to miss a chorus you were welcome on than to wade into one you weren't. The unaccompanied singer is doing something brave and the rest of us hold the room for them. That's the deal.
The flip side: when there IS a chorus, SING IT. Don't sit there with your arms folded being too cool. A session feeds on people joining in. There is nothing sadder than a great rolling chorus and three people mumbling it. Give it socks.
Now. Keys. I cannot stress this enough. You do NOT change the key of a song once it's going. If the woman with the guitar set off in G and G is a touch low for you, that is YOUR problem to solve quietly, not hers to fix mid-tune. Sing it in G. Sing it gravelly. Sing it an octave up if you must, like a wounded heron. But do not, halfway through verse two, hoist the whole thing up to A and expect everyone to scramble after you. That's the cardinal sin. That's the man from Ennis.
A few more, quick, because I could go all night:
Know your ending before you start. Don't trail off going "ah I forget the rest." Pick a song you can finish.
One song each, roughly, before you come back round. Don't be the lad who does four in a row because he's enjoying himself. Spread the love.
Don't talk over someone's song. I know, I know, you're only whispering. You're not. The singer can hear you and it's like a fly in the room.
And if you genuinely don't know a song — sit it out gracefully. Hum if you must, low. There is no shame in not knowing. There is great shame in faking the words loudly and wrong.
The good news with our own beloved beast, The Rattlin' Bog, is that it forgives nearly all of this. It's a cumulative singalong — it WANTS the whole room. The whole point of it is that you can't really get it wrong as a group, because the group IS the instrument. If you want a song to cut your teeth on at a session, the Bog is the gentlest possible place to start. I wrote a whole separate thing about actually getting a Rattlin' Bog session going if that's where your head is — this post is more the general code, the manners. And if you're hunting for other songs the room will know, the songbook is filling up nicely.
Last thing, and it's the most important and the least rule-shaped. Be generous. Clap for the shy ones. Ask the quiet woman in the corner if she has a song — she nearly always does and it's nearly always the best of the night. The etiquette isn't really about NOT doing things. It's about making space so that everyone, including you, gets their moment. The man from Ennis never figured that out. Don't be the man from Ennis.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin the cat has his own session etiquette, which is to walk across the keyboard the EXACT second I sit down to write. He has just done it. I'm leaving in whatever he typed: 7777uujm. Profound, really.