Most drinking songs are about something happening TO you. You get robbed, you get jailed, you get press-ganged, you wake up married to a stranger and a goat. The story does the heavy lifting and the drink is just the weather it all happens in. "The Jug of Punch" is not like that. Nothing happens in "The Jug of Punch." A man sits down. He has a drink. He is content. That's the whole song.
And I love it for exactly that reason.
It opens with the singer wandering out one fine morning in the month of sweet July, hearing a thrush sing in the bushes, and then — and this is the bit I find genuinely lovely — he doesn't say the bird's song was beautiful. He says the song the thrush was singing was "the jug of punch." The bird is on his side. The whole of nature has, apparently, declared in favour of a hot drink. It's such a daft, happy little image and I think about it more often than a grown man probably should.
So what IS punch, while we're here, because half the people who sing this have no clear idea and just assume it means a bowl of fruity stuff at a party.
It does not mean that. Not here. Irish punch, the punch of this song, is a hot whiskey thing. The old recipe is roughly a measure of whiskey, hot water, sugar, lemon, and cloves, all sat in a glass or a jug and drunk warm. You'll hear it called a "hot whiskey" or a "hot toddy" today and it's near enough the same beast. The word "punch" itself supposedly comes from a Hindi word for five, for the five ingredients, and it came to these islands by way of sailors and the East India trade — though I'll be honest, that etymology gets repeated a LOT and I can't swear it's airtight, so take it as a nice story rather than a fact carved in stone. What I CAN tell you for certain is that the drink in the song is warm, it's strong, and it's the kind of thing you nurse slow in a cold corner. That changes how the song feels entirely. This isn't a riotous pints-flying anthem. It's a fireside song.
There's a verse — and it shifts about depending who's singing — where the singer takes a fairly dim view of being teetotal. The gist is that if he were sick or even on his deathbed, and a doctor wrote on his chart with ink and pen, the cure he'd be reaching for is, you guessed it, a jug of punch. Some versions get a bit cheekier about the clergy too, a sort of "even a holy man would have a sup if he was honest" wink. It's not nasty. It's that very specific Irish humour of a man defending his small pleasure against everyone who'd tut at it. He's not picking a fight. He just wants his drink and a bit of peace and he'll make a gentle little case for both.
Nobody can tell you who wrote it, which is how it goes with these things. It's a traditional song, properly old, and it turns up in the song collections of the nineteenth century in various shapes. Different counties have different verses; some are slower and almost mournful, some trot along quicker. The Clancys and a hundred others recorded it and each one nudged it a little. I've put the full traditional words and a proper bit on the history over in the songbook — The Jug of Punch — so I won't transcribe the lot here. Go read it there if you want to learn it.
Here's the thing about WHEN to sing it, because this matters more than people realise. "The Jug of Punch" is not a song for the top of the night. If you fire it out at nine o'clock when everyone's fresh and loud, it falls flat, because it's a quiet song pretending to be a drinking song. It belongs to the lull. That moment near the end of a session when the big numbers are done, the Rattlin' Bog has been roared through twice and exhausted everyone, and the room drops into something softer. THAT is when you start "The Jug of Punch," low, almost to yourself, and you'll find three or four people drift in on the chorus without being asked. It's a song that gathers the stragglers. It's the last warm hour of a good night in song form.
I sang it for my father once, near the end of a long evening, years ago now, and he didn't join in, he just listened with his eyes shut and his glass — a hot whiskey, as it happens — going cold in his hand. He said after that it was a contented man's song. I didn't fully get what he meant at the time. I do now. Most songs want something. This one already has everything it needs. A morning, a bird, a corner, and the drink.
If you're after more in this vein, I keep a running list of the best Irish drinking songs and this one's quietly near the top of it, even if it never shouts about it.
Make the punch real, by the way. Don't just sing about it and drink a lukewarm pint. Honour the man. Get the kettle on.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin the cat dislikes cloves intensely and left the room the one time I made an actual jug of punch to "research" this post. Which I'll grant you was probably just an excuse to have a hot whiskey on a wet Tuesday. The research was conclusive. The whiskey was lovely.