Right. Sit down. I want to talk about The Galway Races, because every time it comes round in a session I get the same daft grin on my face, and I think I finally worked out why.
It's not about anything.
I mean that as the highest possible compliment. Most of the songs we sing are stories — somebody dies, somebody emigrates, somebody loses the run of themselves over a girl in a black velvet band. The Galway Races has none of that. There is no plot. There is no lesson. There is a man who has gone to Ballybrit, and he is STANDING THERE, pint of something in him, and he is pointing. "Look at yer man. Look at her. Look at that crowd over there." That's it. That is the entire song. And it's one of the most purely joyful things you can roar with a room full of people.
So let me try to tell you what it actually captures, because I think people miss it.
Ballybrit, if you've never been (go, honestly, go), is mayhem. The Galway Races as a meeting goes back to the 1860s, and the song comes straight out of that world — a cheap broadside ballad, the sort of thing a hawker would've flogged at the racecourse gate to the very people it was describing. Imagine that for a second. You buy a ballad sheet about the crowd, while standing IN the crowd, being part of the thing the song is laughing at. That's gas. That's the whole spirit of it.
And what does the song do with all that? It makes a list. A breathless, tumbling, can't-catch-your-breath list. Passengers from Limerick. Passengers from Nenagh. The boys of Connemara. The lasses. The gamblers and the welchers and the lemonade sellers and the fiddlers and the colleens with their feet going. It just keeps STACKING people on. There's no narrative arc. There's a roll-call. You're not following a hero, you're standing at the rail watching humanity pour past you, and the song's only job is to keep up.
That's the trick of it. The form IS the meaning. The chaos of the racecourse and the chaos of the verse are the same chaos. A song about a teeming festival has to feel teeming, or it's lying. And then — and this is the bit I love — between each batch of characters you all come crashing back in on "with me whack fol the do fol the diddley idle day," which means absolutely nothing and is therefore PERFECT. It's not a chorus you have to think about. It's a place to breathe and stamp before the next wave of people arrives.
Now. Here's where I get a bit obsessive (you knew this was coming). I keep wanting to call it a cumulative song, and it isn't, quite — it doesn't fold back and repeat the whole growing chain the way our own bog does, sorry, the way the Rattlin' Bog does. (See, even I trip over it.) But it's a COUSIN. It belongs to the same big family — the list songs, the roll-call songs, the songs where the engine isn't "what happens next" but "and another one, and another one, and ANOTHER one." If you like the bog for the pile-up, you'll like the Galway Races for the pile-up. Different mechanics, same daft glorious instinct to keep adding.
I wrote a whole rambling thing about that family once if you want to go deeper — the best cumulative songs — and I nearly snuck Galway in there before I caught myself. Close, but no. It earns its own seat. It's a list song, not a cumulative one, and the difference matters to nerds like me and absolutely nobody else.
Here's the honest history bit, because I'm always straight with you: nobody can hand you an author and a date that holds up. It's traditional. Author unknown. It was on the page in the nineteenth-century ballad world and it was still being sung the length of the country when the collectors came round with their notebooks. If yer man at the bar tells you it was "written in eighteen-such-and-such by so-and-so," ask him to show you the proof. He won't have it. That's grand. Folk songs are slippery, and that's half the craic of them.
What I'd say to anyone learning it: don't worry about the words. You will not remember all the characters and you do not need to. Plant the chorus first — that nonsense line is your anchor — and then just let the verses tumble out roughly and let the room carry the bits you drop. A song this crowded was never meant to be sung perfectly by one person. It was meant to be a CROWD describing a crowd. That's the magic. You're not a soloist. You're another face at the rail.
There's a full set of our songbook lyrics and notes if you want the rest of it, the proper words and all. But really the Galway Races doesn't live on the page. It lives in the eighth pint, the late session, the moment somebody bangs the table and the whole room remembers it's August in Galway even if it's a wet Tuesday in Ennis.
Look at HIM. Look at HER. Look at the lot of us.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin' sat on the windowsill the entire time I was writing this with his back to me, watching nothing in the dark garden, dead still, like he was counting a crowd I couldn't see. Cat's gas. Anyway. Go to Ballybrit at least once before you die, lads.