Song of the Day 3/17: Thin Lizzy, “Whiskey in the Jar”

Popular Irish songs might sound ancient, but many aren’t very old. “The Fields of Atheny,” for example, is about the potato famine, but it was written in the 1970s. “Ragland Road,” the poem, dates to 1946, but it was set to music in 1971. Every war and rebellion in Irish history, and there are a lot of them, produced a crop of songs both during and after the conflicts, so some are recent, and some go back centuries.

After listening to a lot of them I came up with a rule of thumb: The easier the tale is to follow, the more recent its composition. The really old ones, garbled through the generations, make as much sense as an avant-garde French movie.

Consider “Whiskey in the Jar.” Its exact origins are unknown, but it probably dates to the 17th century, according to Alan Lomax. As with any folk song that predates music publishing, many variants exist, but its general plot and several of its lines copy a broadside ballad “Patrick Fleming” (also called “Patrick Flemmen He Was a Valiant Soldier”) about an Irish highwayman who waylaid travelers for years and murdered several of them. He was hanged in 1650.

The singer’s capture differs in most respects from historic accounts of Fleming’s, inaccuracies mostly copied from the poem. Fleming was ambushed, but he wasn’t alone – the sheriff nabbed him with 14 members of his gang. He was betrayed by the landlord of his gang’s hideaway, who turned them in for the reward money. The ballad’s one accurate detail: The landlord soaked the gang’s guns before the raid.

But the fickle woman (in the original poem “my whore,” but in the song usually Jenny or Molly) was invented, which might explain why her motivation is left unexplained – he brings her the loot, so why would she want reward money instead?

Some variants end with the protagonist in prison, others in exile. Some tack on a final verse about the narrator’s love of whiskey and women, perhaps to explain why whiskey is mentioned in the chorus at all, since liquor plays no role in the tale.

The tune’s popularity dates to the 1950s, when the Dubliners made it a signature song in their concerts. They recorded it three times in the ’60s. It made its way to America during the Great Folk Music Scare, when the collegiate group the Highwaymen included it on their 1962 album.

The song made the pop charts in 1973 when Irish rockers Thin Lizzy gave it a rock makeover. It made it to No. 6 in the UK and dominated the charts in Ireland, where it was No. 1 for an astounding 17 weeks.

It didn’t make the American charts until Metallica covered it on their 1998 covers album, “Garage Inc.” It didn’t reach the Hot 100, but it made No. 4 on the Mainstream Rock chart, helped by a video considered gross even by the standards of 1999. It inexplicably won a Grammy.