Right. I get this email about once a fortnight now, and the wording is nearly always the same. "Seamus, we love the bog, but what do we sing AFTER it?" Fair question. You can't do the Rattlin' Bog all night. Well, you can, I've tried, but your throat gives out around verse nine and someone always wants a sit-down song to catch their breath.
So here's my list. My actual one. Not a list a robot scraped off forty other sites, with the same eight songs in the same order and a paragraph each that says nothing. These are the ones I've watched work a room, in real pubs, with real people who didn't know each other an hour before. That's the whole test, by the way. A singalong song isn't the one YOU love. It's the one the lad three stools down, who came in for one pint, finds himself bellowing the chorus of.
Number one, and I won't argue about it, is The Wild Rover. I know, I know. It's the obvious one. Some trad purists roll their eyes because the four claps after "no, nay, never" got turned into a sort of stadium thing and they think it's beneath them. To which I say: cop on. The claps are WHY it works. You don't even need to know the verses. You hear "no nay never" and your hands just go, like a reflex, like the knee thing the doctor does. I've seen people who couldn't tell you a single word of the verses absolutely demolish those four claps with total commitment. That's a good song. That's a song doing its job.
Then there's Whiskey in the Jar. Now I haven't got the full lyrics up in the songbook yet — it's on the list, I keep meaning to, Rattlin' the cat sat on my notebook for most of March — but you don't need me to tell you about it. The "musha ring dumma do dumma da" bit is one of those gloriously meaningless mouthfuls that everyone gets wrong in exactly the same way, which somehow makes it MORE unifying. Wrong together is still together. The Highwaymen verses, the betrayal, Jenny doing him dirty with the water in his pistol — it's a whole film in four minutes. Class song.
The Irish Rover I'd put third, though I'll be honest, it's a song for showing off. It goes FAST near the end and the cargo list ("we had two million bags of the best Sligo rags") is a tongue-twister that separates the committed from the casual. It's cumulative-adjacent, that one, which is probably why I love it. Anything where the song builds and builds and dares you to keep up has my heart. You know my history.
Now. Here's where my list gets opinionated and people start emailing to disagree, which I welcome.
The Galway Races is wildly underrated as a singalong. It doesn't have a clappy gimmick, so it gets left off the lazy lists, but that "with me whack fol the do fol the diddle idle day" turnaround is PURE joy and once a room has it, they'd happily go round another dozen verses. It's got that gallop to it. Horses, gambling, a great day out — the song sounds like the thing it's about. Hard to do.
And I'm putting The Parting Glass on here even though it's technically the opposite of a rowdy drinking song. It's the END one. The lights-coming-up one. When everyone's tired and a bit emotional and Mick's threatening to do "Spancil Hill" for the third time and you need to bring the whole thing in for landing — that's your song. "Goodnight and joy be with you all." I've cried at it. I'm not ashamed. A proper night needs a closer, and there is no closer like it. If your singalong only knows how to go UP, it doesn't know how to end, and a session that doesn't know how to end is just a room full of tired people pretending.
A few I'll mention quick because they earn it and I'm running long. The Black Velvet Band — great story, easy chorus. The Holy Ground — that "fine girl you are" shout is a deadly bit of call-and-response. Star of the County Down — gorgeous, but it's more a listen-and-admire than a roar-along, so know your room.
What I'd say, really, underneath all this, is that a good singalong song is GENEROUS. It hands you a part. A clap, a nonsense syllable, a shouted word, a chorus you can fake your way into by the second time round. The snobby songs, the ones that are all clever verses and no door for a stranger to walk through — they're grand for the fireside, but they won't unite a room. The bog does it best of all, obviously (I'm biased, it's my whole site). But these are the ones I reach for next.
If you want the words to any of them, half are up already and the rest are coming — have a poke through the songbook and shout if I'm missing a verse, the regulars always catch me out.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin' has started yowling along to The Parting Glass specifically. Not the others. Just that one. He sits on the windowsill and joins in on "and all the harm that e'er I've done." I've decided not to think too hard about it.