A fella emailed me last week — Paddy's Day coming up, big do planned, his Irish-American crowd in Boston — and he asked a question I get a lot but had never properly sat down and answered. Why is it, he said, that you can hand someone an Irish song they've never heard in their life and within about a minute and a half they're roaring it like they wrote it? He'd tried it with other stuff. Show tunes, pop songs, didn't take. But the Irish ones land. Why?
And I thought, right, I owe you a real answer, not just "sure they're great songs."
So here it is. Pour something.
The first thing, and people underestimate this, is the actual SHAPE of the tunes. A lot of our old songs aren't in the major scale you'd hear in a hymn or a chart song. They're modal. Dorian, mixolydian, that sort of thing — and I know I just lost half of you, hang on, stay with me. You don't need to know what those words mean. What it means in your ear is this: the melodies don't have that one screechy "leading note" that pulls hard up to the top, the note that makes a song sound finished-and-polished and slightly hard to sing. Modal tunes sit flatter. Rounder. They move mostly by steps, neighbour to neighbour, no big terrifying leaps, and they tend to live inside the range of an ordinary untrained gob having a pint. A song you can sing at the bottom of your chest after three drinks is a song that survives. The screechy ones die out in the pub because nobody can reach them. Centuries of people NOT being able to hit the high note is, I genuinely believe, a kind of editing. The unsingable verses just quietly stopped getting sung.
That's the bit nobody tells you. These songs are the survivors. Every one you know got here by being passed mouth to mouth across maybe two hundred years of kitchens and pubs and emigrant ships, and at every single handoff the hard bits got sanded off and the easy bits got kept. It's natural selection but the predator is "too awkward to sing after closing time." What's left is pure singability. The song has been pub-tested longer than any focus group could dream of.
Then there's the chorus thing, and I've gone on about this before so I'll be quick (well, mostly). The good ones give you something that comes back FAST and repeats words inside itself so you've barely anything to learn. "No, nay, never." "Way hay and up she rises." That's not laziness on the songwriter's part — half the time there wasn't a songwriter, there was a room. A room writes a different kind of chorus than a person at a desk. A room writes the bit the room can do. If a line was too clever it didn't get sung back, so it didn't survive, so you never heard it. The choruses that reached you are the ones that already won the argument.
And our songs are SHAMELESS about telling you what's coming. The call-and-response, the line that gets answered, the list that you can see building before it gets to you. The Rattlin' Bog is the most extreme version of this — it's a cumulative song, it literally announces every verse in advance and then dares you to keep up — but you'll find a gentler version of the same trick all over the songbook. The song is forever showing you its hand. It WANTS you to win. There's no gotcha, no surprise bridge that throws you off. You always know where the next foothold is. That's a generosity built into the form, and I don't think it's an accident — these are songs made by people who wanted everyone in, the shy ones, the half-cut ones, the ones who can't sing a note and know it.
There's a rhythm thing too, a small one but it matters. So much of this music is tied to the dance — jigs, reels, the body knowing the beat before the head does. Even the slow songs carry that pulse underneath, that sway. When a tune sits on a strong steady swing your body grabs the timing for free, and once your feet know when the next line lands, your mouth follows. You're not really learning the song. You're falling into it. Big difference.
So when your man in Boston hands a stranger an Irish song and they've got it in ninety seconds, that's not magic and it's not the drink (mostly). It's two centuries of quiet ruthless editing by every pub that ever held one. Flat singable tunes that don't ask too much of your throat. Choruses a room built for a room. Words that show you the road ahead. And a beat your hips already know. The song was designed to be caught, by anyone, the very first night — except "designed" is the wrong word, because no one designed it. It just kept the parts that worked and let the rest go.
If you want to put any of this to the test, pick one off the best pub singalong songs list and try it on someone cold. Watch them get it. Then you'll feel what I'm on about better than I can write it.
That's the honest answer, Paddy. Sláinte, and tell Boston we said hello.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin' the cat is, by contrast, profoundly unsingable. One note, modal in the sense of "modally furious," delivered at 5am with no chorus and no mercy. Two hundred years of editing would not improve him. I've checked.