There's a lad on the forum some of you'll know — rattlin_bog_brasil. Posts from a place called Petrópolis, up in the hills behind Rio. Lovely fella. Patient with my terrible attempts at Portuguese (I once typed "obrigado" three times in one reply because I was so chuffed I'd remembered the word). And last month he sent me a recording that I have now listened to, I am not exaggerating, more than forty times.
It's his granny singing the bog.
Or — and this is the thing — it's his granny singing SOMETHING. Something that started life as the bog, ninety-odd years ago, in a kitchen in (he thinks) Limerick, and then got on a boat in 1951, and then spent the next seventy years drifting and softening and rearranging itself in the mouth of one woman who never came home and never had anyone to correct her. Nobody around her knew the right words. So the words she half-remembered just BECAME the right words. There was no one to say otherwise.
And lads. Half of them are wrong. And it's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard.
I'll give you an example. In her version, there's no flea. I KNOW. I had to sit down. The verse that should be the flea — the climax, the holy verse, the reason the song exists as far as I'm concerned — is, in her telling, a bird. "And on that feather there was a bird." A bird on the feather. Which, if you think about it for one second, is completely backwards. The feather comes FROM the bird. The whole genius of the cumulative form is that it's a chain of things-on-things, and she's gone and looped it back on itself, feather to bird to feather, an Escher staircase of a verse. She's broken the logic entirely. And she did it without ever knowing, and she sang it that way for seventy years, every Christmas, dead certain.
He told me he genuinely did not learn the "real" version existed until he was thirty-one years old and a Norwegian backpacker sang the proper one in a hostel in Florianópolis. He said — and I'm quoting him, he won't mind — "I felt like I had been told my whole life that the sky was green and it was fine, it was a good green, I liked the green." Then he laughed about it for a paragraph. Gas man.
This is what gets me about folk songs, and I bang on about it constantly so forgive me, but. A song is not a fixed object. It's not a thing you can get wrong. It's water. You pour it into a different jug and it takes the shape of the jug. His granny's jug was a kitchen in Brazil with no Irish people in it and a husband who didn't speak English and six children who learned the song before they learned what the words meant. So of course it changed. How could it not. The miracle isn't that it drifted — the miracle is that ANY of it survived the crossing at all.
And the bits that survived are the bits that matter. The chorus survived. "Ho ro the rattlin' bog" — she had that nearly dead-on, just a little rounder in the vowels, the way Portuguese rounds you. The melody survived totally intact. The BUILDING survived — that thing where each verse stacks on the last and you have to gulp more air and go faster and the whole room (or in her case the whole family) ends up roaring. That's the load-bearing wall of the song and it held. Everything else, the specific furniture of it — the flea, the order of the branch and the twig, whether there's a nest or a feather first — that's all just decoration, and decoration is allowed to drift. SHOULD drift. That's how you can tell a song is actually alive and not pinned to a card in a museum.
If you want to see how stubborn the "correct" version is by comparison, go look at the lyrics I keep here, or have a poke through the wider songbook — those are the settled, agreed, this-is-how-it-goes versions. They're grand. I love them. But they're the photograph. The granny in Petrópolis, she's the living thing, blurry and breathing.
I asked rattlin_bog_brasil if he was going to "fix" the version now that he knows the proper one. Teach his own kids the flea and the right order and all. He thought about it for two days. Then he wrote back and said no. He's going to teach them BOTH. The real one, so they're part of the big family of everyone who sings it. And his granny's one — the bird on the feather, the looping impossible staircase — because that one is only theirs. That one belongs to one woman from Limerick who got on a boat and never came back, and now it belongs to her great-grandchildren, and to me, a bit, and now to you.
I think that's exactly right. You keep both.
(There's a thread brewing on the forum where folks are sharing the "wrong" versions they grew up with — a Scottish lad swears his nan had a SHEEP in it somewhere, which, where, on WHAT branch — and honestly it might be the best thread we've ever had. Go add yours.)
If any of you have a half-remembered, drifted, "wrong" version from a granny or an uncle or a summer camp in 1987 — send it. I will treasure it. Wrong is just a version that travelled further than the others.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — I played the Brazilian granny's recording in the kitchen the other night and Rattlin', who normally ignores the song completely, walked over and sat directly in front of the speaker for the entire two minutes. When it finished he looked at me. I've no explanation. The cat has opinions about regional variations apparently.