I want to tell you about a Tuesday.
Not a big Tuesday. Nothing happened that anyone outside the snug of Brogan's would ever clock. No one filmed it. There's no clip. If you'd walked past the window you'd have seen the usual — twelve or thirteen of us, a few pints going warm, Mossie tuning the same string he's been tuning since 2009. Grand. Ordinary. The kind of night that doesn't make a story.
Except it did. For me anyway.
There's a woman comes to our session — I'll not use her real name because she'd absolutely die, so let's call her Bríd. Bríd has been coming for two years. TWO years. And in two years she had, by my count, never once sung a verse on her own. Not because she can't. God, no. You'd hear her on the choruses and there's a clear true note in there, the kind that sits right under everyone else's and holds the whole thing up like a floorboard. But verses? The bit where you're on your own for a few bars, naked as anything, the whole room turned to you? No. She'd hang back. She'd find her drink suddenly very interesting. (We all know that move. I invented that move.)
And here's the thing I've learned slowly, over a lot of Tuesdays. You can't push it. You CANNOT. The minute you go "go on, Bríd, give us one yourself" across a quiet room, you've ruined it. You've made it a performance, a spotlight, a thing she now has to either do or visibly refuse in front of fourteen people. That's not welcome. That's pressure wearing welcome's coat.
So nobody pushed. For two years.
What we did instead — and I genuinely think this is the whole secret of session culture, the entire thing — is we kept the door open and we said nothing about it. We'd leave a gap. You know? You finish a song and instead of someone leaping in, there'd just be a second. A breath. Room. And if nobody filled it, grand, Mossie'd start something. No big deal either way. But the gap was always there. An open hand, palm up, never grabbing.
I've written before about how the chorus is the front door of this song — how the whole genius of the Rattlin' Bog is that you can walk in knowing nothing and be roaring "rare bog, rattlin' bog" by the second go-round. That's true and I stand by it. But the verses are the back rooms. The verses are where you have to actually remember the order, hold the cumulation in your head, the tree and the branch and the twig and the nest and the egg and the bird and — you know the whole mad ladder of it. And to lead a verse you have to trust yourself to not drop the ladder. In front of people.
Anyway. Tuesday.
We were maybe forty minutes in. Doing the Bog, naturally, because of course we were. And we got to that lovely suspended moment — the chorus had landed, everyone breathing, the next verse hanging in the air waiting for someone to claim it.
And Bríd just... started it.
Quiet. SO quiet. "And on that twig there was a branch" — wait, no, she had the order right, I'm getting it wrong telling it — anyway she had it, she had the line, and her voice came out smaller than her chorus voice, a wee bit wobbly on the front of it, and you could see her own surprise at herself, like the words had jumped out before the nervous part of her brain could file the paperwork.
And the room did the right thing. The room held its breath. Nobody whooped. Nobody cheered her on like she was a toddler taking a step (which would've shattered it). We all just — got very still, and very soft, and came in UNDER her on the next bit, just enough to catch her if she fell, not enough to take it off her. She led. We followed. She got to the end of her verse and there was this tiny half-second where she looked up, checked the faces, found nothing but warmth, and went a bit pink, and Mossie — God love him — didn't say a word, just nodded once and rolled straight into the chorus so the moment could keep moving and she didn't have to be looked at.
That's it. That's the whole story. A woman sang eight bars.
I drove home buzzing like I'd won something.
I've been chewing on why it hit me so hard, and I think it's this. We talk about these songs being about community, and we mean it, but mostly when we say "community" we mean the easy bit — the crowd, the volume, the safety of being one voice among forty. That's real and it's gorgeous. But the harder, truer thing a session does, the thing that takes YEARS and that no app can do, is it makes a place safe enough that a frightened person can be brave in it. Slowly. On her own clock. Nobody filming. The reward for two years of showing up being that one Tuesday the door's still open and you finally walk through it.
A session is a very long, very patient act of welcome. That's all it is. It's not the tunes really. The tunes are the excuse. The welcome is the thing.
Bríd led a verse next Tuesday too, by the way. Bit louder. Didn't wobble. Didn't look up to check the faces this time, which is how you know.
If there's a shy one in your session — and there's always a shy one, sometimes it's you — don't push them. Just leave the gap. Leave it every week. Say nothing. One Tuesday they'll fill it, and you'll have to drive home not making a big deal of the best thing that happened to you all year.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin the cat has no such reticence and will yowl a lead verse over anyone, in any key, unasked. We have not been able to teach him the open-hand approach. He is fourteen-ish and beyond instruction.