Here's the thing nobody tells you about this song until you're stood in a pub at half eleven with a pint going warm in your hand: you already know it. You learned it in a schoolyard. You just didn't know that's where you learned it.
I'll Tell Me Ma is a skipping song. A street-game rhyme. Wee ones clapping and turning a rope and chanting about Albert Mooney loving the belle of Belfast city — and then somehow the SAME tune walks into a session forty years later, gets a bodhrán and a banjo behind it, and the whole room is roaring. That's the magic of it for me. The playground and the pub drink from the same well. (I find that genuinely moving and I will NOT apologise.)
A Bit of History
Right, let me be honest with you the way I always try to be: nobody knows exactly where this one came from, and anyone who tells you they've got a precise date is selling you something.
What we DO know is that it lived as a children's street song long before it was a pub standard. Folk collectors in Britain and Ireland gathered versions of it as a singing-game rhyme — the kind of thing scooped up by people documenting playground culture in the early-to-mid twentieth century. The "belle of Belfast city" line is the one most folk fix on, and it's why a lot of people call it The Belle of Belfast City. But — and here's the gas part — you'll find the very same shape of song with the city swapped out. Dublin city. London city. Wherever the child singing it happened to live. Folk songs are like that. They wear local clothes.
There's an Irish layer and an English layer tangled up here and I won't pretend to untangle them cleanly, because honestly the scholars can't either. Some versions are titled The Wind, after the opening line about the wind blowing high. The melody and the words drifted and crossed and got picked up on both islands.
What turned it from a rope-skipping chant into a session anthem? The folk revival, mostly — the 1960s onward, when trad acts started pulling old children's rhymes and street songs up onto the stage. Once it had a fast strum and a crowd behind it, it was never going back to the skipping rope full-time. (Though kids still chant it. Both things are true at once. I love that.)
So: traditional, public domain, murky as a bog pool, and all the better for it.
Lyrics
I'll tell me ma when I go home, The boys won't leave the girls alone, They pulled my hair, they stole my comb, But that's all right till I go home.
She is handsome, she is pretty, She is the belle of Belfast city, She is courting one, two, three, Please won't you tell me who is she.
Albert Mooney says he loves her, All the boys are fighting for her, They rap at the door and they ring at the bell, Saying "Oh my true love, are you well?"
Out she comes as white as snow, Rings on her fingers, bells on her toes, Old Jenny Murray says she'll die, If she doesn't get the fellow with the roving eye.
Let the wind and the rain and the hail blow high, And the snow come tumbling from the sky, She's as nice as apple pie, And she'll get her own lad by and by.
When she gets a lad of her own, She won't tell her ma when she goes home, Let them all come as they will, For it's Albert Mooney she loves still.
How to Sing It
This is a fast one, lads. Do NOT take it slow and reverent — that's the wrong song entirely. It wants to gallop. The whole charm is the breathless schoolyard run of it, like a child rattling the words out before they forget them.
The verse and the chorus share the same tune, more or less, so once you've got the "she is handsome, she is pretty" bit, you've basically got the whole song. That's WHY it works in a crowded pub — nobody needs a lyric sheet. The room teaches itself in two rounds.
A few practical things from years of doing this badly and then less badly:
Clap on it. I mean it. This started as a clapping game and your hands know what to do even if your head's forgotten. A room clapping along on "she is HANDSOME, she is PRETTY" sounds like a hundred people and feels like a thousand.
Don't be precious about the words. Half the room will sing "Dublin city" and half will sing "Belfast city" and a few brave souls will shout their own town. Let them. It's a folk song. It belongs to whoever's singing it tonight.
Pitch it where the kids can reach. If there's wee ones about, they'll know this one cold, and there is nothing — NOTHING — better than a child belting out the belle of Belfast city while the grown-ups grin.
Put it after something slow to lift the room. If you've just done The Parting Glass and everyone's gone misty, this is your rescue rope — straight into it, fast, and you've got the night back. Or pair it with another rowdy gallop like The Wild Rover and you've a proper singalong stretch.
And if you want the full words to learn them properly, our main lyrics page has the lot laid out clean, and the rest of the songbook is filling up nicely.
That's the lesson of this wee song, and it's the same lesson as the Bog itself: the best songs aren't taught down to you from a stage. They come UP from the schoolyard, the street, the rope turning, the hands clapping. We're just the ones lucky enough to still be singing them.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin' the cat does not approve of clapping. Every time I demonstrate the rhythm for this one he leaves the room with great dignity. His loss.