Right, so a fella emailed me last week — lovely email, all the way from a choir in Galway — asking what a "salley" actually IS. And I realised I've been singing this song my whole life and never once stopped to wonder. That's the thing about songs you learn young. They go in before the questions do.
So. A salley is a willow. That's it. That's the whole mystery.
It comes from the Irish saileach, which is just the word for a willow tree, and over the centuries it got worn down in the mouths of country people to "salley" or "sally." A salley garden was a little plantation of willows, grown deliberate, usually near a river or a wet bit of ground, because willow loves the damp. You'd grow them so you'd have the rods — the long bendy whips — for making baskets, creels, thatching scollops, all the bits and bobs a farm needed before plastic ruined everything (I'm only half joking). So when yer man in the song meets his love "down by the salley gardens," he's meeting her in a willow grove. A working place. Not some fancy ornamental thing. A wet, green, ordinary corner of Sligo where the willows grew.
And honestly that makes the song sadder to me. It's not a palace. It's a willow patch by the water where two young people stood once and one of them gave good advice that the other was too thick to take.
Now here's the part I actually want to tell you about, because it's gas, and it changed how I hear the song entirely.
Yeats didn't write it.
Well. He sort of did. He half-wrote it. He REBUILT it.
When William Butler Yeats published the poem in 1889, in a collection called The Wanderings of Oisin, he gave it a note. And the note is one of the most honest things a poet ever wrote. He said the poem was "an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballisodare, Sligo." Three lines. That's all she had. An old woman in Ballisodare could only remember three lines of some song she'd heard decades before, probably from someone who themselves half-remembered it, and Yeats took those three battered surviving lines and grew the rest of the poem back around them — like splinting a broken thing and letting it knit.
He even gave it a title at first that admitted what he'd done. He called it "An Old Song Re-Sung." Re-sung. Not written. Re-sung. As if the song had always existed and was only waiting for someone to remember it properly.
I think about that a LOT, lads. Because that's exactly what we do here, isn't it? That's the whole shrine. Half the verses of the Rattlin' Bog that get argued over in the forum — somebody's nan sang it one way in Clare and somebody's granda sang it another way in Tyrone and we're all sitting here trying to reconstruct the "real" version from three lines imperfectly remembered. There is no real version. There's only the re-singing. Yeats just had the decency to admit it on the page.
(And before any of the trad purists email me — yes, I know the melody most people sing it to, the gorgeous "Maids of Mourne Shore" air, was set to it later by Herbert Hughes in 1909. The tune and the words came together like a lot of these things do. By accident, by feel, by someone deciding it just fit.)
So what's it actually ABOUT, the song? On the surface it's the simplest thing in the world. Boy meets girl down by the willows. She tells him to take love easy, "as the leaves grow on the tree." Down by a river she tells him to take life easy, "as the grass grows on the weirs." And he, being young and being an eejit (his words, sort of — "but I was young and foolish"), didn't listen. And now he's full of tears. That's the whole song. Two verses. A few dozen words. A lifetime of regret folded up small.
It's a song about not listening. About the advice you only understand twenty years too late, standing in a different field, wishing you could go back to the willows and just COD ON and be easy about it all.
I sing it slow, at the very end of a session, when the place has gone quiet and the pints are nearly done and somebody's leaning on someone's shoulder. It sits beautiful next to The Parting Glass — both of them songs for the last hour, for the leaving, for the soft sad part of the night. If you want the full words and a bit more on the willow business, I've put it in the songbook here, and the lyrics page has the lot of our songs in one place.
Take love easy, the woman said. Take life easy. And we don't. We never do. But we sing about it after, which is maybe the next best thing.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin the cat is sitting in the windowbox where I'm trying to grow a willow cutting in a jar of water, because of course I went and bought one after writing this. He has not knocked it over yet. Give him time.