A padded envelope came on Thursday with a Limerick postmark and no note inside. Just a cassette.
A cassette. An actual cassette, lads. The clear plastic kind with the little hub holes, the tape gone slightly brown the way they do. Someone had written on the spine in biro: "CLARE SESSION '74 — REEL XFER." That's it. No name, no return address that I could find (I checked twice, I even held the envelope up to the window). Just a tape, sent to a man who hasn't owned a tape player since maybe the Ahern government.
So I had to go find one. That was its own saga. I rang my brother, who said he'd a deck "somewhere in the attic," which is brother-speak for "I will not be finding that." In the end Deirdre's nephew had a hi-fi separates thing from a car boot sale and he dropped it over, bless him, and we plugged it into the back of the telly with an adapter that smelled faintly of burning, which I'm told is normal.
I made tea. I want you to know I made tea first. I had the sense, somehow, that this wasn't a thing to do standing up with my coat on.
And then I pressed play.
It opens mid-conversation. That's the thing about reel-to-reel — somebody just leant over and hit record when the notion took them, so you come in halfway. A man is saying something about a pint, and a woman laughs, and somewhere behind them a fire is going (you can hear it, the soft collapse of a turf fire, I'd know that sound blindfolded). Glasses. A chair scraping. And then a fiddle starts up, a bit out of tune, finding itself, the way they do before a session properly settles.
Then they sang the bog.
I'm not going to pretend I was calm about it. It's a session in Clare, in 1974, fifty-two years ago, and they're singing OUR song — the rattlin' bog, the tree in the bog, all the way up through the branch and the twig and the nest and the bird and the egg and the FLEA — and the whole room comes in on the response. You can hear them not know the words and come in anyway. That's the thing nobody tells you about old recordings. It's not the soloist. It's the room. It's eleven or twelve people leaning in on "the rattlin' bog, the bog down in the valley-o" and getting it slightly wrong and not caring at all.
I've spent twenty years collecting the lyrics and arguing about verse order on the forum at two in the morning. And here were these people in 1974 doing the only thing that actually matters, which is singing it together in a warm room while the turf burned down.
Some of those voices are gone now. They have to be. Do the maths. A man who was, say, sixty in 1974 — well. He's not at the session anymore. None of them are, probably. And there's something I can't put a tidy bow on about hearing a person laugh, clear as anything, knowing the laugh outlived the lungs that made it. The tape doesn't know they're gone. The tape just keeps the laugh going, every time you press play, the same as it was, the same warmth, the fire still burning down to nothing in a room that doesn't exist anymore.
I listened to it twice through. Slowly. The second time I didn't make tea, I just sat.
A couple of small things, and I only mention them because I'm honest with you lot. There's a verse in their version I don't know — comes in after the bird, before the egg, something about "a wing on the bird" that I've never heard sung anywhere and isn't in any printed set I own. Could be a local Clare thing. Lots of sessions had their own little extra rungs on the ladder; that's half the joy of it. I'll transcribe it properly when I've a clearer head.
And one of the laughs — a woman, low, at the end of the flea verse — I'd swear I knew it. Sounds like someone. I can't place who, and that's the sort of trick a tired mind plays on you at eleven at night with the fire going and a fifty-year-old tape spinning. Familiar laughs are a dime a dozen. We've all heard a stranger laugh exactly like our mother. It's nothing.
Anyway. I'm sending it off to BogArchaeologist to digitise it properly, and I'll see can we date it tighter than "'74." It's not the oldest thing we have — nothing touches the 1903 wax cylinder for sheer age, and that one keeps me up at night for entirely other reasons — but the '74 tape might be the warmest. The oldest recording proves the song is old. This one just proves it was loved, in a particular room, on a particular night, by people who'd have been astonished to learn a fella in Ennis would be crying over it in 2026.
Whoever you are who sent it: thank you. I don't know how you knew to send it to me. But thank you.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin' sat on the hi-fi the entire time it played, tail down over the volume knob, not moving, not even when I came in close. He's not a sitting-still cat as a rule. When it clicked off at the end he got up and left the room. Cats, I know. But I noted it.