Every few weeks now I get an email from a teacher. Sometimes a parent. The question is nearly always the same, dressed up in different words: "I want to teach my kids an Irish song, where do I even start?" And I love that question. I love it because it means another little gang of children are about to learn that singing together is one of the best things a person can do, and most of them won't even realise it's good for them. They'll just think it's a laugh. Which it is.
So. Where do you start. Let me tell you what I actually think, after years of watching this work and watching it flop.
You do NOT start with "Danny Boy." I know, I know. It's beautiful. It'll make a grown man cry into his pint. But it's slow, it's sad, it sits up at the top of the range where a seven-year-old's voice cracks like a frozen puddle, and worst of all the words mean nothing to them. "Ye'll come and find the place where I am lying." A child does not want to think about you lying in a grave, lads. They want to think about a bird. On a twig. On a branch. On a tree. In a bog.
Here is the whole secret, and it's not really a secret: start with a song that BUILDS.
The fancy word is cumulative. A cumulative song is one where each verse adds a thing and then repeats everything that came before, so the song gets longer and faster and more ridiculous as it goes. "The Rattlin' Bog" is the king of them (I would say that). But there's a whole little family — "The Twelve Days of Christmas," "Green Grow the Rushes O," and the gloriously grim one about the old lady who swallowed a fly. I'll come back to why she's a secret weapon in a minute.
Why do these work so well with children? It's not magic, it's just how small heads are built. A child cannot hold a whole song in memory the first time through. Nobody can. But a cumulative song doesn't ask them to. It hands them ONE new word per verse — bog, tree, branch, twig — and then it loops back and lets them rehearse everything they already know, over and over, at speed. They're not memorising. They're playing a game. By the fourth verse, half the room is shouting the bog line before you even get there because they OWN it now. It's theirs.
And the repetition does something else that I think people underestimate. It buys time for the shy ones. The quiet child at the back who would never volunteer a solo — that child can come in three beats late on "and the green grass grew all around," catch the wave, and ride it. By verse six they're not late anymore. They're in. I have watched this happen. I have watched a teacher in Tipperary watch this happen and go a bit teary about it, which she'll deny if you ask her.
A few practical things, because I'm not just here to be sentimental.
Slow down at the start. The temptation is to show off how fast the song gets. Don't. The speed is the reward at the END. Teach the first three verses dead slow, almost boring, until everyone's confident. Then let it run. The acceleration is the fun part, but only if the foundation is solid. A song that collapses in a heap by verse four isn't fun, it's just noise, and the kids feel the failure even if they can't name it.
Use your body. Cumulative songs are BEGGING for hand gestures. Make a flat hand for the bog, point up for the tree, a little branch shape, a twig — whatever. Children remember through their bodies far faster than through their ears. The actions become a backup memory system. When a child forgets the word, the hand remembers it for them. Class trick. Costs nothing.
Don't correct the small mistakes. If a five-year-old sings "twig" where "branch" should go, let it ride. The whole point of these songs is the group carries the individual. Stop the song to correct one child and you've taught the whole room that singing is a test you can fail. It is not a test. It is the opposite of a test.
And get the order right, because cumulative songs live or die on the order. For "The Rattlin' Bog" the standard run is bog, tree, branch, twig, nest, egg, bird, feather, flea. If you want it laid out plain, the full lyrics are here and I've drawn them out so a teacher can photocopy them and not have to fight with my rambling. The flea verse, by the way, is the CLIMAX. Save it. Build to it. When a room of children realises the song is now about a flea on a feather on a bird in an egg in a nest on a twig on a branch on a tree in a bog — and they have to sing ALL of it, fast, in one breath — that's the moment. That's the one they'll remember at forty.
Now, the old lady who swallowed the fly. She's brilliant for slightly older or braver classes because she's a tiny bit dark, and children adore a tiny bit of dark. "Perhaps she'll die." They LOVE that. They'll gasp and giggle. It's a cumulative song wearing a little Halloween costume, and it teaches the exact same memory skill as the bog, just with more drama. Use her when you want the giggles.
If you teach in an Irish school you probably already know "The Rattlin' Bog" is half a curriculum unto itself by now — I wrote a whole rambling piece about how it took over the schools and the principals who quietly dread the racket of forty children hitting verse nine at full tilt. Sorry, principals. Not sorry.
The thing I'd leave you with is this. You're not teaching them a song. You're teaching them that they can do a hard thing together that they couldn't do alone, and that the doing of it is pure joy. The song is just the excuse. Pick one that builds, slow it down, use your hands, and trust the group. They'll surprise you. They always do.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin' the cat has decided my desk is now hers while I write these, and she has strong opinions about the flea verse, for obvious reasons. She left when I got to "old lady who swallowed a fly." Read into that what you will.