‘Wild Rover’: the life of Ireland’s greatest boozing ballad
It seems frankly offensive to have to tell you this, but I’m sorry to break the news: one of the great boozing ballads of Ireland was actually born in England.
You might need to sit down after reeling from that shock, and I don’t blame you. But for every time you’ve sat drunkenly in an Irish bar or stormed the streets on St Paddy’s Day, swooning through shouts of “No, nay, never,” I regret to say that you’ve actually been singing a song of English temperance and about cutting back on the drink.
But alas, the old story of the ‘Wild Rover’ was not one that began with its tricolour identity embedded so deeply in the same way that it is now. Long before the song ever took on its most popular muse, its dynasty actually extended as far back as the 17th century, when it was written as a drinking ballad which, oddly enough, was campaigning against drinking.
Yes, you read that correctly, and no, I’m not actually drunk while writing this. Yet in terms of traditional English drinking songs, the original version of ‘Wild Rover’ fell into an odd phenomenon, where there was a strain of the genre that genuinely advocated for abstinence. That’s sacrilege if ever you’ve heard it.
However, whether you’re willing to accept it or not, that is how the initial version of ‘Wild Rover’ came into the world, written based on works by Thomas Lanfiere, a character about whom very little is known. As such, it was pretty much free rein for The Dubliners to take over the song as they saw fit when they found it in 1964, and transform it into what it was always meant to be.
Having made their name in the mean streets and pubs of the Irish city, it was the band’s manifesto to take traditional music and create a whole new lifeblood for it through a folk sensation. Subsequently, and presumably as the drinks flowed, the tempo increased, and the party had only just begun.
The raucous singing and stamping of feet may have become a standard and stereotypical staple of Ireland and its cultural representation as we know it today, but it would never have been so if The Dubliners had never commandeered once sleepy songs like ‘Wild Rover’. They only saw it as fulfilling the destiny of the riot that the song’s name always lived up to.
Poor Lanfiere, whoever he was and wherever he may be, is bound to be rolling in his grave at what has become of his legacy. A man who set out to highlight the noble cause of abstinence has metamorphosed into the very opposite, through a load of pints being thrown down the song’s neck, as well as a trip across the Irish Sea.
But for their own part, The Dubliners always carried an immense pride in what they had created, giving rise to a whole culture of their own by inebriating the people within it, one by one. As a result, the sloshing shouts of “Sláinte” and the path of the ‘Wild Rover’ will continue for the rest of time, always singing “No, nay, never… no nay never, no more.”
