So I open the contact form on Monday morning, tea going cold beside me, fully expecting the usual — somebody asking why the lyrics page has the flea before the feather, somebody from Australia telling me their version goes "rattlin' BOG" and not "rare bog," the standard Monday traffic. Instead there's an email from a woman named Petra in Hamburg with a WeTransfer link and a subject line that just said "for you, from the choir." And lads. LADS.
I have listened to this recording about forty times now. I am not exaggerating for the website. Forty.
Petra conducts a community choir — twenty-six people, she says, ages roughly nineteen to eighty-one, who meet on Thursday evenings in a church hall near the Elbe. None of them are Irish. Most of them, by her own cheerful admission, do not speak much English at all. And somehow, over the course of a few months, they learned ALL TWELVE VERSES of the Rattlin' Bog. Phonetically. Sound by sound. The way you'd learn a song in a language you don't speak — you just memorise the shape of it.
Now here is the thing I keep coming back to. They learned it not really knowing what most of it meant.
Petra told me they knew "bog" was a swampy bit of ground because she explained that one. They knew "tree" and "branch." But the rest of it — the bird, the nest, the egg, the feather, the flea — for a good while these were just sounds to most of the choir. Beautiful nonsense. She said one of the older gentlemen, a retired electrician called Klaus, sang the whole flea verse for weeks believing "flea" was some kind of Irish blessing. He was a little disappointed when she told him. (Honestly, Klaus, I'm with you. The flea verse IS a blessing. Keep believing it.)
And you can hear all of this in the recording. That's what undid me.
The accent is its own thing entirely. "Rattlin'" comes out closer to "rattling," every consonant crisp and counted, no Irish slur on it at all, and somehow that makes it MORE charming, not less. "Bog" they pronounce with a properly rounded German "o," so it lands like "bohg," and there's this lovely heaviness to it. When they hit "and the green grass grew all around, all around" the whole choir leans into the R's in a way no Clare man ever would, and it should be wrong but it is so completely, gorgeously right.
There were a couple of mispronunciations that I have decided to love forever. "Feather" became something like "fezzer," soft and fond. "Twig" got an extra little breath in front of it. And my favourite — the bit where the song builds back down through every verse, that breathless cumulative tumble that's the whole point of the thing (if you don't know the structure, the lyrics are all here and the Bog itself has its own page) — they take it at this careful, deliberate, slightly-too-slow pace, like people crossing a stream on stepping stones, watching every foot. And then around the fourth or fifth time through they catch the momentum and the whole hall just GOES, and you can hear someone in the back laughing while they sing.
That's it. That's the moment I keep rewinding to. Twenty-six people in Hamburg laughing while they sing a daft Irish song about a tree in a bog, and not one of them quite sure what a flea has to do with anything.
I rang my brother to play it down the phone to him and he was quiet for a second and then he said "they got it." And he's right. They got it. Not the words — the THING. The reason the song exists. It was never about the bird or the egg or the feather. It's about a room of people holding a melody together and refusing to let it fall. You do not need a word of Irish or English for that. The tune carries the meaning the words only point at. I've banged on about this for years on this site and I never had proof before. Now I have a WeTransfer link.
Petra asked, very politely, if any of the pronunciations were embarrassing and whether I could send corrections. I wrote back and said please, PLEASE, do not change a single sound. The "fezzer" stays. Klaus keeps his blessing. The careful stepping-stone tempo is now, as far as I'm concerned, the official Hamburg arrangement and I will be defending it against all comers.
If you're somewhere far from Ireland and you've taught this song to people who'd never heard it — a class, a choir, a houseful of cousins at Christmas — I genuinely want to hear it. The contact form is right there. I've started a little folder. The Hamburg recording is the first thing in it and it has set a fierce high bar.
To Petra, to Klaus, and to all twenty-six of you on the Elbe: tausend Dank. You've no idea what you sent me. A song I've loved my whole life, handed back to me in an accent I'd never heard, and somehow it sounded brand new.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — I played the recording out loud in the kitchen and Rattlin' sat in the doorway for the entire eight minutes, ears up, not moving. He does not do this for the radio. He does not do this for me. Make of that what you will. He has good taste, is what I'm saying.