Grand session at Cruise's this week. Three new faces, all of them under twenty-five.
One of them — a lass named Siobhan — told me she found Cruise's because of this website. She's been learning the Bog from a TikTok video (of course she has) and she wanted to find a session where people actually PLAYED it. Someone in a comment on one of the videos mentioned this pub, mentioned there was a website, and she came looking.
She came LOOKING, lads. Drove all the way from Galway to find a session because of something I posted in 2002.
Mick Hennessy was teaching the new ones the flea verse — "On the flea there was a hair, a rare hair, a rattlin' hair." Mick's been doing this for forty-odd years, never seen the song generate this kind of interest. He kept saying "Fair play to you, learning it from the internet," like he was marveling at the strangeness and the rightness of it all at once.
We played through the whole thing with the new ones this time. All seventeen verses. They kept up, too. Young musicians today, they've got good ears. Good focus. Maybe it's because they CAN learn from the internet — you can slow videos down, rewind them, listen a hundred times. We didn't have that luxury.
But they brought something too. Energy. Interest. They CARED about getting it right. They'd done their homework before they showed up.
That's the thing about this song, I'm realizing. It teaches you something about patience and structure and how small things build into something HUGE. You start with a rat. You end with a whole cosmos of objects hanging from each other.
Maybe that's why the young people are finding it now.
Slan go foill,
BogLord2002