Now THIS one. This is the song I'd point at if a stranger asked me, "right, but what's actually the closest relative of your Rattlin' Bog?" Twelve Days of Christmas is the famous cousin, sure, everybody knows that one. But Green Grow the Rushes O is the weird cousin. The one nobody fully understands. And I love it for that more than I can properly explain.
Because here's the thing. It's a counting song. It builds, verse on verse, one up to twelve, exactly the way the Bog stacks branch on bough on tree. Same engine. Same lovely climbing dread of "oh God, can I remember all twelve this time." But where the Bog is just a tree and the birds in it, sweet and clear and daft, THIS song is stuffed full of lines that nobody — not folklorists, not vicars, not the lads in the snug who've sung it forty years — can fully decode. "Two, two, the lily-white boys, clothed all in green O." Who? WHO are the lily-white boys? People have been arguing about it for the guts of two centuries and there's no answer everybody agrees on. None.
That's catnip to a man who runs a shrine to a song about a tree. Of course it is.
A Bit of History
Hat off, honest as I can be, because this is exactly the kind of song people fake certainty about and I won't do it to you.
It's old. How old, nobody can say with a straight face. It was being printed in collections by the early-to-mid eighteen-hundreds, and it was clearly already well-worn by then, sung all over England with the words drifting from county to county the way folk songs always do. Anybody who tells you a precise birth year is having you on. Oral songs are ancient long before the ink ever finds them.
The strongest theory — and I want to be clear, it IS only a theory — is that it's a teaching song. A catechism dressed up as a counting game. Lots of the cryptic numbers seem to map onto religious ideas: the "one is one and all alone and evermore shall be so" sounds like God, the twelve are read as the apostles, the "rivals" might be a slip of the tongue from an older word, and so on. The "April rainers" almost nobody can pin down at all. Some folk reckon bits of it are older than Christianity entirely and got a churchy coat of paint slapped over much older pagan counting, the seasons, the green man, that whole layer underneath. Some folk reckon that's romantic nonsense. I genuinely could not tell you who's right, and neither, honestly, can they.
What I CAN tell you is that the muddle is the point now. Singers misheard, swapped, half-remembered, and handed it on regardless, and the song just absorbed all of it and kept going. That's not corruption. That's how a living song stays alive. The mystery isn't a flaw in the thing. It's the thing.
Lyrics
This is the full cumulative version — you sing each verse counting DOWN from your current number back to one, the way you'd unstack it. Public domain, traditional, the common set.
I'll sing you one, O Green grow the rushes, O What is your one, O? One is one and all alone And evermore shall be so.
I'll sing you two, O Green grow the rushes, O What are your two, O? Two, two, the lily-white boys, Clothed all in green, O, One is one and all alone And evermore shall be so.
Three, three, the rivals, Two, two, the lily-white boys...
Four for the Gospel makers, Three, three, the rivals...
Five for the symbols at your door, Four for the Gospel makers...
Six for the six proud walkers, Five for the symbols at your door...
Seven for the seven stars in the sky, Six for the six proud walkers...
Eight for the April rainers, Seven for the seven stars in the sky...
Nine for the nine bright shiners, Eight for the April rainers...
Ten for the ten commandments, Nine for the nine bright shiners...
Eleven for the eleven who went to heaven, Ten for the ten commandments...
Twelve for the twelve apostles, Eleven for the eleven who went to heaven, Ten for the ten commandments, Nine for the nine bright shiners, Eight for the April rainers, Seven for the seven stars in the sky, Six for the six proud walkers, Five for the symbols at your door, Four for the Gospel makers, Three, three, the rivals, Two, two, the lily-white boys, Clothed all in green, O, One is one and all alone And evermore shall be so.
How to Sing It
Slower than you think. This is NOT a race song. Where Drunken Sailor wants a stamping gallop, this one wants a steady, almost solemn roll, because the whole pleasure is the unstacking — getting from twelve all the way back down to "one is one and all alone" without losing your place. Rush it and you fall off a cliff somewhere around the six proud walkers. (Ask me how I know. Don't, actually.)
Best way to teach a room: don't hand out the meaning, because there isn't one, and trying will tie you in knots. Just hand out the SOUNDS. Get them confident on the response line — "green grow the rushes O" — first, the same way you'd drill a chorus, then let the cryptic numbers wash over them. They'll mishear half of it. GOOD. That's the tradition working in real time, right there in your kitchen.
And lean into the strangeness, don't apologise for it. When somebody inevitably stops and goes "hang on, who are the lily-white boys?" — that's your moment. Tell them nobody knows. Watch their face. It's the same delight people get when they realise the Bog never actually ends. For the song that started all this counting-madness, the full words live on the lyrics page, and if you want the other great cumulative cousin to pair it with on a long night, Drunken Sailor is the one that gets a quiet room roaring before you bring this strange green thing out into the hush.
Sing the mystery, lads. Don't solve it.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — I asked Rattlin the cat, very seriously, who he reckons the lily-white boys are. He looked at me for a long moment and then walked into the other room. Make of that what you will. I have decided to make nothing of it.