Here's a song that left Ireland and came back wearing a different hat.
I love The Wild Colonial Boy. I love it for a slightly contrary reason, which is that it's barely an Irish song at all by the time most of us learned it, and yet it's one of the most Irish songs you'll ever hear in a Clare pub. Both things are true. Bear with me.
The story it tells is simple enough. There's a young fella — born in Ireland, shipped or drawn out to Australia — who turns bushranger. A robber. An outlaw on the roads of the colony. He's bold, he's generous to the poor, he robs the rich and the squatters, and eventually three mounted troopers (Kelly, Davis and FitzRoy, in the version I sing) corner him, and he goes down fighting rather than be taken. That's the shape of it. A short, doomed, glorious life, sung at a brisk clip with a chorus that practically dares you not to thump the table.
Now. The names.
This is the bit that gets me, and it's the bit nobody warns you about. The "wild colonial boy" is called different things in different versions, and people will go to WAR over it. The most common name you'll hear is Jack Doolan (or Dolan, or Duggan — even the spelling won't sit still). But sing it in another county or another country and he's Jack Donahue. Or John Dowling. Or Jim Doolan. I've heard it as "Jack Duggan from Castlemaine" and I've heard the very same melody, same plot, name swapped out like a man changing coats at the door.
And here's why, which is the genuinely fascinating part.
There WAS a real bushranger. John "Bold Jack" Donahue — an Irishman, transported to New South Wales around 1825, who broke loose and ran wild on the roads until the troopers shot him dead in 1830. The colonial authorities were so rattled by the song that grew up around him — "Bold Jack Donahue," it was called — that they banned it. Singing it in a pub could get you in trouble. So what do people do when you ban a song? They keep singing it. They just change the name so you can't prove what they're at. Donahue becomes Doolan becomes Duggan, and the dangerous, specific, real outlaw quietly turns into a kind of folk everyman. A lad who could be anyone's son.
That's not a bug in the song. That's the whole genius of it. The name going soft and slippery is the song protecting itself. (I think about that a lot, honestly. A song wearing a disguise to survive. Folk music does this more than people credit.)
So when you hear someone insist their granny's version with "Jack Doolan" is the "real" one and somebody else's "Jack Donahue" is wrong — they're both right and both a bit wrong. There's no single true text. There's a townland's worth of texts and a banned outlaw underneath all of them.
The other thing worth saying: this is an Irish song that became an Australian song that came home. The bushranger tradition — Ned Kelly is the famous one, but there were dozens — was thick with transported Irish and the sons of transported Irish, men who carried the old country's deep, deep suspicion of the law and the landlord out to the far side of the world and planted it in the bush. The Wild Colonial Boy is the sound of that suspicion set to a marching tune. It's the same heart you hear in a hundred Irish ballads about a bold lad versus the redcoats — just relocated to the gum trees and the gold fields.
Which is why it sits so easy in an Irish session. The accent of it is ours even when the geography isn't.
There's a cousin to it in the songbook that I always mention in the same breath, and that's The Black Velvet Band — another song about a young Irishman who ends up transported to the far side of the world, only that one's a fool led astray by a pretty girl and a stolen watch, where the Colonial Boy chooses his outlawry with both eyes open. Same convict ships, two very different lads aboard. If The Black Velvet Band is the cautionary tale, The Wild Colonial Boy is the legend the lads sang about afterwards to feel less afraid. I haven't a proper page up for the Black Velvet Band yet (it's on the list, I PROMISE), but the rest of the songbook is coming along grand, and there's a fair few of these transportation and outlaw songs gathering in there.
How do you sing it? Briskly. It's not a slow lament — it MARCHES. There's a temptation, because it ends in death, to drag it out mournful, and I'd resist that. The whole point of the song is defiance, not grief. He didn't die sad. He died loud. So you keep the tempo up, you let the chorus swing, and you let the room come in on "come all me hearties, we'll roam the mountains high" because that line was built to be roared by strangers. It's a chorus song first and a tragedy second. Get that order wrong and you'll bore the table.
And if you want a wholly different kind of counting-and-climbing tune to clear your head after all that gunsmoke, my soft spot for The Irish Rover is well documented elsewhere on here. Different machine entirely. Same impulse — Irish people putting their whole heart into a tall, doomed, glorious story.
The bog will keep, lads. The Colonial Boy was just passing through.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — I told Rattlin (the cat) that "wild colonial boy" was a perfectly good name for a tomcat and she has, of course, never robbed anyone of anything except my dinner, which she does daily, with no remorse and no troopers in pursuit. Bold Jack Donahue had less nerve. I'm certain of it.