Right, I want to talk about a song that lies to you.
Not on purpose. But if you've only ever heard The Banks of the Roses sung at a session — and most people have — you've heard a sweet thing. A bouncy, daft little courting song. Lad meets girl on the banks of the roses, there's a bit of will-they-won't-they, her father grumbles about him being a rake (fair), and it skips along on a tune you could clap a baby to sleep with. Lovely. I've sung it that way myself a hundred times, on the good nights, when the room's warm and nobody wants anything heavier than a love song with a wink in it.
And then one evening about ten years ago a man named Donal sang me the OTHER verses.
We were in a kitchen in Kilrush, three of us left and the kettle long cold, and Donal — older than me, learned half his songs off his uncle who learned them off nobody-knows — starts into Banks of the Roses, grand, same as always, and then he keeps GOING. Past where everybody stops. And the verses that come out the far end are not a love song. Not even slightly. There's a line in some versions — I'll not write it out plain because it always gives me a chill — where the lad, having been crossed by the girl or her people, talks about what he'll do to her. And it is dark, lads. It is a threat. The melody never changes. That's the awful, brilliant thing about it. The exact same skippy little tune carries you from "I met my love on the banks of the roses" to a young fella muttering about a knife and a grave, and it doesn't blink.
I sat in that kitchen with my tea gone stone cold and thought: I have been singing the friendly half of a murder ballad for twenty years and never once asked what the other half said.
So I went and did the homework, because that's the kind of sad article I am.
Here's the honest shape of it. The Banks of the Roses is old and it's a tangle, and anyone who tells you a clean origin story for it is selling you something. It turns up in Ireland and it turns up in England and it turns up in versions collected off broadside sheets — those cheap printed song-sheets they'd flog on street corners in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, the tabloids of their day, full of love and death and hangings because that's what sold. And the broadside roots of this one are not gentle. Some printed versions are squarely a song about a man's jealousy curdling into violence. Other versions — the ones that survived into the sessions — sanded that right off, kept the courtship and the cheek and the father's disapproval, and quietly let the dark verses fall out of memory. Which is how you end up with two songs wearing the same name and the same tune, and most of the country only knowing the nice one.
I don't think the sanding-off was a conspiracy. I think it's just what a room does. You're at a wedding, or a kitchen session, or somebody's nan is there, and you get to the verse where it turns and you go — ah, we'll leave it there. And the next fella learns it from you with the dark verses already gone, and after enough years they're gone for everyone. Folk songs forget on purpose. That's not a flaw in them. It's nearly the whole point. The same thing that lets the Rattlin' Bog grow and change in every village is the thing that lets a song quietly drop the verse where somebody dies. The tradition edits itself in the dark and never leaves a note.
Now — what do I actually do with it, at a session?
I sing the gentle half. I'm not going to pretend otherwise, and I'm not going to lecture you into the threat verses when there's a child two seats over and the night's a happy one. I keep the friendly version in the songbook and that's the version I'll teach a beginner first, because it's a class wee tune and it's grand for the voice. But I think you should KNOW the other half exists. I think it matters. Because a love song that can turn that hard, on the same melody, without flinching — that tells you something true about the people who made these songs. They were not soft. They knew what a jealous young man with a notion is capable of, and they put it in a tune you could dance to, and they trusted you to feel the wrongness of that yourself.
That's the bit AI and the lyric websites always miss, by the way. They'll give you "a traditional Irish courting song" and a tidy summary and they'll never tell you it's got a second face. It's got a second face. (Donal, if you're reading this, you ruined that song for me in the best possible way, and I owe you a pint.)
If you want to hear the dark for yourself, look up the older broadside versions and the field recordings — the ones the collectors took down without smoothing — and brace yourself. Or don't. Sing the roses and the courting and the cross father, and leave it there, the way the sessions decided to. Both are honest. One's just kept the knife in the drawer.
That's the one I'll be singing Saturday. Drawer shut.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — I tried to sing the gentle version to Rattlin the cat to test if it'd settle her and she bit me on the thumb at the exact line about the father disapproving, which I'm choosing to read as her being a critic and not a coincidence. The thumb's grand. The song's grand. We're all grand.