Right. So a lad emailed me last Tuesday — earnest fella, lovely manners — asking why "the foggy dew song" on YouTube was "about a war" when the version his nan sang was clearly a love song. And I sat there with my tea going cold thinking, oh no, here we go again. Because this is one of the great muddles of Irish music. There is not one Foggy Dew. There are at least three, depending on how you count, and people merge them in their heads the way you'd merge two dreams you had the same night.
Let me try to untangle it, because honestly nobody ever did it properly for ME when I was young and I spent about a decade thinking they were the same song with a verse missing.
The one most people mean now — the famous one, the one that makes your throat go tight — is the 1916 ballad. The Easter Rising one. "As down the glen one Easter morn / to a city fair rode I." That's the war one. It was written by Canon Charles O'Neill, a parish priest from Co. Down (Kilcoo, then Newcastle), some time around 1919. He saw the men who'd fought, and the men who'd gone off to die in France for someone else's empire instead, and he put the grief of it into words. The TUNE, though — and this is the bit people miss — the tune is much older. He set his new words to an existing air, a slow traditional melody that already carried other songs. So even the famous Foggy Dew is itself a bit of a Frankenstein, new words on old bones. Which I find gas, really, given the confusion that followed.
Then there's the OLD Foggy Dew. The love song. This is the one the lad's nan was singing. It's much, much older — turns up in broadsides going back to the 1700s, English and Irish versions both — and it's a completely different beast. A young man, a maid, a cold night, "the foggy dew" as the thing that drove her into his arms (and there are bawdier readings and tamer readings depending on who's singing and whether the priest is in the room). Burl Ives recorded a version. A.L. Lloyd sang one. Benjamin Britten arranged it, of all people. It has NOTHING to do with 1916. Nothing. Different words, different mood, different tune entirely. The only thing it shares with the Rising ballad is three words in the title.
And THEN — because three wasn't enough — you get the muddle where people half-remember a third thing, or graft a verse of one onto the melody of another, and you end up with these YouTube comment sections where forty people are confidently wrong in forty different directions. (I read them so you don't have to. It's a public service. You're welcome.)
So why do people mix them up? Same title, mainly. "The foggy dew" is just a lovely, evocative phrase — fog, dew, the soft grey of an Irish morning — so it got reused. Songwriters weren't precious about titles the way we are now. There was no Spotify, no metadata, no algorithm filing things into neat little boxes. A song was whatever the woman in the next townland sang, and if she called it the same as another song, well, that was your problem to sort out, not hers.
Here's the thing that took me ages to accept: this is NORMAL for folk music. It's not a bug. The whole tradition is built on borrowed tunes, drifting words, songs that split into two songs that split into four. I've gone on about this before in my piece on where the bog song actually comes from — the Rattlin' Bog has cousins all over Europe and nobody can say who had it first either. Folk songs aren't owned. They're passed around like a flu in a small school.
If you want my honest take on authorship — and people DO push me on this — I'd say: be careful with anyone who tells you the 1916 song's tune is "definitely" such-and-such a named air, or who gives you a precise year for the old love song. The words of the Rising ballad we can credit fairly to Canon O'Neill, grand, that much is solid. But the tune's older life and the love song's exact origins fade off into the broadside murk, and anyone claiming certainty there is selling you a tidier story than the truth supports. I'd rather say "we're not sure" than make something up. (My da taught me that. About songs AND about everything else.)
If you want to actually SING one, it's the 1916 ballad you're nearly always after at a session — that's the one that goes quiet and hits hard around the fourth pint. I've put it in the songbook with the history laid out, and you can always cross-check against the full lyrics page for our own bog song while you're in there. Just please, please, when you post it online, don't tag it as the love song. The love song lads get fierce upset. (And they're right to.)
Anyway. Three songs, one title, two centuries, and a parish priest in Down quietly writing the one everybody remembers. Folk music, lads. It never makes it easy.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin' sat on the keyboard halfway through writing this and added about four hundred lines of the letter "j". I've left it out of the post but I want it on record that he had opinions.