Here is a thing nobody tells you about a good pub singalong. Almost nobody in the room knows the words. Not really. Not the verses.
I mean it. Stand in a pub in Ennis on a Friday with forty people belting away and I will bet you my good bodhrán that maybe four of them could write down the second verse without help. The rest are mumbling. Humming. Doing that thing where you sort of shape your mouth around a word a half-beat after everyone else and hope no one's watching. And it does NOT matter. That is the whole secret. The best pub songs are built so that not knowing the words is grand, because the bit that counts comes around again and again and it's so simple a child could grab it.
So this isn't a list of clever songs. It's a list of songs with bulletproof choruses. The verses are scaffolding. The chorus is the building.
Let me explain what I mean by bulletproof, because I've thought about this far too much (don't @ me). A bulletproof chorus does three things. It's short. It repeats words inside itself so you only really learn one line and the rest is echo. And it has a shape your body already wants to do — a swing, a stamp, a "HEY". You hear it once and the second time round you're already in. That's the test. Can a complete stranger join on the second pass? If yes, it'll carry a night. If they need the third or fourth pass, you've half-lost the room already.
The king of this, obviously, is the one I've built an entire website around. The chorus to The Rattlin' Bog is nothing but "the rattlin' bog, the bog down in the valley-o" said twice with a "ho ro" stuck on the front, and that's IT. You don't learn it. It happens to you. The verses pile up — the tree, the branch, the twig, the nest, the egg, the bird, the feather, the FLEA (the flea verse is the climax, fight me) — and yes the joy of the song is racing through that list at the end without losing your place. But here's the thing. Even the people drowning in the list, even the ones three verses behind and laughing, they all snap back together for "ho ro the rattlin' bog." Every single time. The song is engineered to forgive you. That's why it works on a stag do and at a school concert and at a funeral, which I have witnessed all three.
Right. So what else clears the bar.
I'll Tell Me Ma is up there with the very best. "She is handsome, she is pretty, she is the belle of Belfast city" — by the time you've heard it once you have it, and the "she is courting one two three, please won't you tell me who is she" is so chant-able that kids do it in the schoolyard without ever meaning to learn it. A song that teaches itself. That's the gold standard.
Drunken Sailor is almost cheating it's so easy. "Way hay and up she rises" three times and a sea-day line. You can run it forever, make up verses, get filthy, get silly, the chorus never moves. I've seen a French hen party who spoke maybe ten words of English between them roaring that chorus like they were born to it. Because they basically were. Everyone was.
Now. A controversial opinion. The Wild Rover gets called the ultimate pub song and I half agree and half don't. The "and it's no, nay, never" with the four claps is genuinely brilliant — that clap is the secret, your hands know it before your brain does, and a room that's clapping is a room that's committed. BUT. Here's my problem. The verses are actually a bit fiddly and the temptation is to slow the whole thing into a dirge by the third pint. A great singalong should never sag. The Wild Rover sags if you let it. Lovely song. Needs a firm hand on the tempo. (My da would disown me for saying that. Sorry, da.)
I'll give you my one rule for the person picking the song, because someone always asks me this. Don't pick the song you love most. Pick the song the room can already half-do. There's a savage difference. I adore The Parting Glass — it's the most beautiful goodbye ever written and I want it at my funeral — but it is NOT a singalong. It's a listening song. A holding-your-pint-still song. If you start that one expecting forty voices you'll get four and a lot of misty eyes, which is gorgeous but it's not the same job. Know which job you're doing.
What ties the good ones together? Repetition you can hide inside. A chorus that comes back fast. And a little physical hook — a clap, a stamp, a "HEY", a fist in the air on the long note. Give the room something to DO with their hands and they'll forgive themselves for not knowing verse three. They'll forgive everything. That's the magic of it. Nobody knows the words and the whole place is singing anyway and somehow it's the truest sound there is.
If you want to actually run one of these properly — when to start, how slow to begin, when to let it rip — I wrote the whole thing up in how to start a Rattlin' Bog at a session. Same principles travel to any of these.
Go on. Pick the one the room half-knows. Trust the chorus to do the rest.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin' the cat has a chorus too. It's one note, repeated, at 5am, directly into my ear. Bulletproof. Carries the whole house. I have not yet found a way to slow the tempo.