Last March a lad in the pub — visitor, nice fella, Boston by the sound of him — was wearing one of those novelty leprechaun hats the size of a bin lid, the kind with the buckle on the front, and he was singing along to The Wearing of the Green with great gusto and not the first notion what the words actually meant. And I didn't correct him. Because there's something I genuinely love about a song so angry being sung that happily by a man in a green plastic hat. The song outlived its own war. It got SO old and so beloved that we forgot it was a weapon.
But it was a weapon. Let me tell you about that, because it's the thing people miss.
To understand this song you have to go back to 1798, and you have to understand that green was not, at that point, a colour you wore for fun. The United Irishmen — your Wolfe Tones, your Napper Tandys, the whole rising — had taken green as their colour. The shamrock, the green ribbon, the green cockade in the hat. And when the rising was crushed, and crushed it was, brutally, the wearing of that green became its own kind of statement. A dangerous one. The line in the song — "they're hangin' men and women there for wearin' o' the green" — is not poetic exaggeration dressed up for effect. It's pointing at something real. The repression after '98 was savage, and a green ribbon could mark you out as the wrong sort of person to the wrong sort of soldier. (I went into the broadsheet side of all this over on the songbook page for the song, so I won't repeat the printing history here.)
Here's what I find clever about it, though, and what I think is the real reason it survived. It's CODED. The whole song is a smuggling operation.
Think about it. If you stood up in a square in 1799 and shouted a speech about the United Irishmen and the rising and the men who'd been hanged, you'd be in a cell or worse before you finished. But a SONG? A song about a fella who's sad he can't wear his favourite colour anymore? That slips past. It travels. You can hum it. You can sing it half under your breath walking home. And everyone who needs to know what it's really about knows EXACTLY what it's really about, and everyone who'd want to stop it just hears a tune about grass and ribbons. That's not an accident. That's how oppressed people have always sung the things they weren't allowed to say out loud. You wrap the grievance in a melody and you let the melody carry it through the checkpoint.
And there's that one verse that I think is the heart of the whole thing — the bit about taking the shamrock from your hat and casting it on the sod, and it'll "take root and flourish still, though under foot 'tis trod." That's the trick of the song in a single image. You can stamp on the colour all you like. It grows back. You cannot, the song says, ban a colour out of existence, any more than you can ban grass from being green. Sing THAT in a room full of people who've just watched their movement crushed and tell me it's only about a ribbon. It's defiance with a smile on it. It's "you haven't won, and you can't win, and here's why, and good luck arresting me for singing about gardening."
Now I'll be honest with you the way I always am — the song we sing today is not exactly the song of 1798. These things never are. The raw early street-ballad versions came first, anonymous, passed mouth to mouth on cheap broadsheets, and then decades later your man Dion Boucicault reworked it for the stage in the 1860s and added his own verses and a softer landing. So when somebody sings you "the most distressful country" tonight, they might be carrying a line from the 1790s and a line from the 1860s in the same breath and not know it. (Again — the full who-added-what is laid out in the songbook, I'd only mangle it twice.) The song EVOLVED. It's a living thing, not a fixed document, and pretending otherwise is exactly the kind of false certainty I can't stand.
Which is the bit, I suppose, that connects it back to everything else I bang on about here. A song that changes as it travels, that nobody really owns, that gets a verse added in one century and worn as a plastic hat in the next — that's not a flaw in folk music. That's the whole point of it. It's the same reason The Rattlin' Bog has eleven verses in some mouths and seven in others, and the same reason nobody can give you a clean origin date for half the songs we love. They belong to whoever's singing, and the singing changes them. The Wearing of the Green just happens to be one where the stakes, once, were a rope.
So next Paddy's Day, when the whole world goes green and nobody thinks twice about it — give it a thought. There was a time and a place where the simple act these tourists do for the craic was a thing you could be killed for. The song remembers, even when the singers don't. That's what songs are for.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin (the cat) is, as I've said before, a tabby with not a thread of green on him, so he's safe from the redcoats at least. He sat on the windowsill the whole time I wrote this glaring at a magpie. Different war entirely.