I was up in Galway for a wedding the other weekend — not mine, God no, a cousin of Marie's, lovely day, I cried at a reading I'd never heard before and then ate three desserts to recover — and on the Sunday before the bus home I stood on Shop Street for the guts of two hours just listening. That's a grand way to lose a Sunday, by the way. Cheaper than the pub and you get a better band.
And it was on Shop Street that I learned the buskers of Galway have a PACT.
I didn't believe it at first. Let me tell you who told me, because it matters. There was a woman maybe sixty, fiddle player, set up outside the spot where the old bank was, and she was deadly — proper old-style bowing, none of your flashy carry-on. I dropped a few coin in and got chatting between her sets the way you do, and I made the mistake (it was not a mistake) of telling her I run a small site about the rattlin' bog. And her whole face changed. "Ah," she says. "You'd want to talk to the lads about the bog."
The LADS. About the BOG. There are lads. There is a bog conversation. I nearly sat down on the wet ground.
Here's what she laid out for me, and I've checked it since with two other buskers by email so I'm fairly confident it's real and not just one fiddler having a laugh at the tourist with the notebook.
Rule one: you don't play the bog before noon. This is iron. The bog is a participation song — you need a crowd with a few pints in them or at least a crowd that's woken up properly and isn't just hurrying to Mass or to a hangover. Pull it out at half ten in the morning and you'll get a footpath of mortified people staring at their shoes, nobody'll do the response, and you've wasted the best card in the deck on a dead room. "It's a closer or a peak-of-the-day song," she said. "Not a warm-up." She's RIGHT. I've been saying a version of this for years on the lyrics page without knowing it was already busker law in another county.
Rule two — and this is the one that got me — there's a courtesy about overlap. If a busker forty feet up the street is mid-bog, you do NOT start the bog. Even if it's your big number, even if you've a crowd ripe for it. You wait. Because the whole magic of the response — "the bog down in the valley-o" — falls apart if two crowds are shouting different verses at each other across the street. One fella's crowd is on the nest and the other's only at the branch and now it's just NOISE. So they have, and I love this, a sort of unspoken bog right-of-way. First one in owns the street till he's done. The fiddler called it "letting the bog clear." LETTING THE BOG CLEAR. Like a junction. I have not stopped thinking about it.
Rule three is about the flea. (You knew I'd get here.) Apparently there's a friendly rivalry over who has the nerve to actually GO for the full verse stack — tree, branch, nest, egg, bird, feather, FLEA — out on a cold street with a moving crowd. Plenty of buskers bail at the nest because by then half your audience has a bus to catch. The ones who push all the way to the flea verse, who hold a footpath of strangers hostage through the entire cumulative climb until the flea on the feather on the bird in the egg comes crashing home — those are the ones who get the nod from the others. It's a badge. The fiddler said there's a young guitarist who does it every single time, never bails, and the older buskers half slag him and half worship him for it. That's my kind of man. Bail at the nest and you've sung a song. Hold them to the flea and you've thrown a small free party. There's no contest. The flea verse is the whole REASON, I keep telling people, and here's a street in Galway that already knows it in its bones.
There was a fourth thing she mentioned that I'm still chewing on. She said the bog is "a sharing song, so it's a sharing pitch" — meaning if one of them gets a proper bog going, a great roaring one, the others up and down the street don't see it as competition. They drift their own sets to feed into it. Somebody'll start clapping the response from their own pitch. It pulls the whole street into the one tune for three minutes. Then everyone goes back to their own corner like nothing happened. She said it like it was nothing. It is not nothing. It's the song doing the exact thing the song is FOR, except now it's organising grown professionals who've never agreed to it out loud.
I asked her was it written down anywhere, this code. She gave me a look like I'd asked was the weather written down. "It's just known," she said. And that's the most Irish answer in the world and also the truest thing about the bog itself. Nobody wrote it. Nobody owns it. It's just known. The song and the etiquette around it are made of the same stuff — handed across, never minuted, enforced by nothing but the fact that everyone who matters already agrees.
I got the bus home with a head full of it. Stood on a footpath, learned more about the song I've banged on about for years than I'd managed in months at this kitchen table. The buskers of Galway have been quietly running a constitution for the rattlin' bog and never told a soul because nobody asked. Class.
If you're ever on Shop Street of a warm evening and you hear a roar go up and a whole stretch of the street suddenly shouting valley-o at the one moment — that's the pact working. Drop the man a coin. He's earned it the hard way, all the way out to the flea.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin' (the cat) does not approve of buses and let me know it for a full day after I got back, sitting with his back to me like a betrayed accordion. If you want a second number for your own hat someday, the songbook has a few that'll hold a crowd — but on a Galway street, before noon or after, the bog is still the one that owns the junction.