How to Write an Irish Song

Up until I was past thirty years old I had never written a song. My first song, which I unfortunately cannot presently remember, was a Valentine's Day song for my present wife strummed on the cheapest electric guitar in the world and mumbled incoherently. This is actually not true, but is near enough true that the improvement over the original story is worth claiming that it is true. This is the first lesson in how to write an Irish song, it should be written and sung and believed to be absolute truth, regardless of how the pedantic might feel.

The Irish song tradition is without doubt a romantic tradition. The subject matter should be love, or pride of place or country, or tragedy. The lyrics should be written in a poem with rhyme and meter, a poem in the traditions of the great romantic poets of Tennyson, Shelley, Byron and Yeats. All poetic tricks of alliteration, repetition, foreshadowing, metaphor should be used with freedom. An archaic phrasing has great effect.

Irish song is attached to the land, the people and the tales of Ireland. When searching for inspiration you should walk in the blustering wind, feel dark, rich earth beneath your feet, sit beside a fire, drink of stout and poiteen, and be surrounded by the rich green of vegetation and never the lurid kelly green of faux Ireland.

As an example of the method I shall use what I consider one of the greatest Irish songs, Raglan Road by Patrick Kavanagh.

An Irish song starts with a time and place, specificity adds authenticity. A time and place produces a framework for the listener to build their image of the scene. In this case, "On Raglan Road of an autumn day," notice the archaic use of "of" (which I may have inserted myself, I think it improves it). This beginning with a time and place is nearly ubiquitous, from "On the fourth of July 1806 and we set sale from the sweet cove of Cork" in the Irish Rover, to "As I was going over the far famed Kerry mountains" of Whiskey in the Jar, to the modern Shane MacGowan's A Pair of Brown Eyes, "One summer evening drunk to Hell I sat there nearly lifeless. An old man in the corner sang where the water lilies grow."

Once a time and place has been established the next step is to paint the foundational image upon which the rest of the song can be built. In this case "That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might someday rue." The image is of long, dark hair. The feeling is of attraction and danger. The line has a very precise meter, and repeated rhymes, one within the line and the other at the end of a rhyming couplet. This sets a pattern for the rest of the poem, and patterns of this sort are vital within Irish music. Irish music is peasant music, it should be immediately accessible without surprises, the opposite of Jazz. In each verse try to return to the imagery of this first image.

At this point we have a time (Autumn), a place (a Dublin street), an image (tangling dark hair), and a feeling (doomed attraction) for the rest of the song. We have a pattern of rhyming couplets with as many rhymes within a half line as possible.

What happens next is that you take this grounding in real time and space and move slowly into the realms of fantasy. In this case Grafton Street is given a deep ravine. In the Irish Rover at a similar point the ship in question starts having seven masts and a million barrels of bones. In The Galway Shawl the fantasy portion starts when the beautiful maiden invites the itinerant minstrel into her home to meet her father. Part of the Irish tradition is a excitement and a fear of fantasy and magic. The little people, the faeries, and so on are beautiful and tempting, living just within a hill or a wood and so within reach of the everyday, but they are unpredictable and dangerous.

The song then comes to a conclusion, in this case the loss of the Angel, with The Irish Rover the sinking of the ship, with The Galway Shawl the minstrel leaves unrequited, in A Pair of Brown Eyes the protagonist stumbles away from the pub towards the loved sounds of long ago.

Now, you may be thinking, he's talked about a poem but nothing to do with the music, how can this be? Well, that's because the music portion is so simple. There are two methods of making Irish songs, one is simply to set the poetry you have written to an ancient Irish tune. In this case Patrick Kavanagh set his poetry to an 18th century air named The Dawning of the Day. Your poem should have a meter to it, when spoken out loud you will be able to tell the rhythm of the music that will go to it, where the beat goes. The alternative method is to simply put the poem into a major key, begin and end with the major chord, put a seventh chord before that final chord and make sure there's a minor chord in there as well. Fiddle with these chords and you'll get something that fits (which will probably already be an Irish tune.

In On Raglan Road the chords are two lines that go in a poetic order of ABBA:

DGDGD
GDBmDA
GDBmDA
DGDGD

There are no key changes, no bridge, no chorus and only two lines simply repeated. The key with the music of Irish music is not to get innovative, to keep it simple, to follow very basic rules. If the basis is good then good musicians can innovate, improvise, enhance and experiment over the top of this structure.

If you get stuck go for a walk in nature, sleep on it and then sometime in the next few days you will discover that you have solved your conundrum without trying.

The most important part is that if you feel a little guilty that you seem to have stolen all the parts of your song from elsewhere and simply slapped them together you are doing it exactly right.