Here is the strange thing about "The Mermaid," and it's the thing nobody warns you about the first time you hear a room belt it out. Everybody on that ship dies. Every single one of them. The captain, the cabin boy, the lot — drowned, gone, the ship at the bottom of the sea. And the whole crowd is GRINNING while they sing it. Roaring it, even. There is a man near the bar doing the spinny hand gesture for the chorus and beaming like it's his birthday.
It's a song about a shipwreck sung like it's a wedding. And I think that's the most Irish-pub thing I can possibly tell you about it, even though the song isn't strictly Irish at all.
Let me explain.
The plot, such as it is, is short and grim and a bit daft. A ship sets sail on a Friday — bad luck right there, every sailor knew you didn't sail on a Friday — and the captain spots a mermaid sitting on a rock with a comb and a glass in her hand. And every sailor worth his salt knew what THAT meant. A mermaid sighted from the deck was a death omen, plain as anything. Sure enough, up comes the storm. And then we get this lovely little procession where each crew member steps forward to have his last word.
The captain speaks first. Then the cabin boy, who's usually the one that breaks your heart a bit — "oh I am a little cabin boy" and he's worried about his mammy, the poor lad. And one by one they go down with the ship while the verse counts them off. It's a doomed roll-call set to one of the cheeriest tunes ever written. The contrast is the whole joke. The song KNOWS it's funny, and it knows it's sad, and it refuses to pick one.
Now. The history bit, and I'll be straight with you because I always try to be on this site.
"The Mermaid" is OLD. This isn't some Victorian music-hall novelty, though it got dressed up like one for a while. It's a genuine traditional ballad, and it sits in the great catalogue that a fella named Francis James Child put together in the 1800s — the Child Ballads, as everyone calls them, a huge collection of English and Scottish traditional ballads that scholars still number to this day. "The Mermaid" is Child number 289. (I find that a deeply satisfying thing to know, that a daft pub song has an official scholarly serial number, like it filed paperwork.) It was already kicking around in the 1700s in printed form, a broadside ballad sold on cheap paper, and the bones of the story — the mermaid omen, the wrecked ship, the sailors' farewells — go back further than any printed copy.
So is it Irish? Not originally, no. It's a British-and-Scottish ballad by birth. But here's the thing about a good song: it goes where it's wanted, and it gets a new accent at every stop. It travelled. It crossed the water, it crossed the Atlantic, it turned up in American collections and in folk revivals on both sides, and somewhere along the way it became a fixture in the very Irish business of a crowd singing together for the pure joy of the noise. I learned it in Clare. My father learned it I-don't-know-where. The version you know is almost certainly a little different from mine, and that's not a flaw, that's the song doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
And the chorus. Oh, the chorus. This is why the song survives, if I'm honest, far more than the plot. "And the ocean waves do roll, and the stormy winds do blow" — and then the round-and-round bit, the spinning sailors, everyone going up and down and up and down with their voices like the deck pitching under them. It's a chorus you can do drunk. It's a chorus you can do not knowing the verses. You can join a room mid-song, latch onto that "round and round" and be a full crew member within four seconds. THAT is the magic. The verses tell the story but the chorus is the whole point — it's the bit that turns a roomful of strangers into one rolling ship.
Which, you'll forgive me, is the same reason I bang on endlessly about the Rattlin' Bog. Different machine entirely — the Bog builds up and up and dares you to remember the chain, where "The Mermaid" just rolls the same wave over and over. But both songs do the one essential thing. They give a crowd a handhold. Nobody's left standing there mouthing along not knowing the words. Everybody's in.
If you want the full traditional words and a proper bit on how to land that spinning chorus without the whole room falling out of time, I've put it all in the songbook — here's The Mermaid. And if you're building a whole night of these, it earns its place easily among the best pub singalong songs, because it asks nothing of you except a willingness to roll.
One bit of advice, learned the hard way. Don't oversell the sad parts. The cabin boy verse is genuinely moving and you'll be tempted to slow right down and make a meal of it. Don't. The song's whole trick is that it grieves and grins at the same time, at the same speed. Let the tune carry the sorrow. Your job is just to keep the ship rolling.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin the cat has, over the years, sat through every one of these songs on the windowsill with the air of a creature who has heard it all before and judged it. But she genuinely does not like "The Mermaid." Every time we get to the round-and-round chorus she leaves the room. I have no explanation. A cat that has no opinion on a sea shanty but a strong one on a mermaid ballad. Make of that what you will, I'm too tired to.