Raglan Road

Storytelling has always been at the heart of the Irish folk music tradition. And, in Ireland, the link between poetry and music has ever been a compelling one. Successful authors like Thomas Moore, James Clarence Mangan, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Sean O’Casey and Brendan Behan all dabbled in music. But the ultimate crossover success was achieved by a farmer’s son from rural Monaghan. In a public poll conducted by the State broadcaster RTÉ in 2019, ‘On Raglan Road’ was chosen as Ireland’s Favourite Folk Song. Written originally as a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, it was brought to musical life and made famous by the revered ballad singer, Luke Kelly of The Dubliners.

The Story Behind The Song

Thomas Osborne Davis, of the Young Ireland movement, once wrote that, “National poetry is the very flowering of the soul – the greatest evidence of its health, the greatest excellence of its beauty … It shows us magnified, and ennobles our hearts, our intellects, our country, and our countrymen.”

Poetry and music have long had a symbiotic relationship in Ireland. Indeed, the folk tradition of poetry in Irish was often passed down through song. The nation’s great tradition of ballad poetry, in straightforward, relatively unadorned verse, celebrated the myths and heroes of Irish legend and chronicled its contemporary champions and events. Our great lyric poets in turn honoured the epic stories, the drama, the history and the philosophy that made Ireland unique.

“Have not poetry and music arisen,” the poet William Butler Yeats once wrote, “out of the sounds the enchanters made to help their imagination to enchant, to charm, to bind with a spell themselves and the passers-by?”

Yeats is the Irish poet most commonly translated to music. For a modern audience, his poem ‘The Song Of Wandering Aengus’ was set to music by the folk duo Bud & Travis in 1960. It has since been performed by such diverse artists as Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Christy Moore, 10,000 Maniacs, and Donovan, who would set the poem to his own melody for 1971’s HMS Donovan.

More recently, the artist most notable for setting Yeats’ words to music is Mike Scott of The Waterboys. The band’s adaptation of ‘The Stolen Child’ was included on their best-selling album Fisherman’s Blues and they would go on to release an entire album based on the words of the poet with 2011’s An Appointment with Mr. Yeats. But the most famous and enduring example of poetry being successfully married to music was written by Patrick Kavanagh and made famous by Luke Kelly.

Born in either November or December of 1940 (the former according to his mother, the latter printed on his birth certificate!), Luke Kelly was an Irish singer, folk musician and actor from Dublin. Kelly left school at 13 and departed his working-class home, taking the emigrant boat to England as so many did in the 1950s. He became involved in folk music in the UK, attending folk clubs first in Newcastle-On-Tyne. Returning to his home town in the 1960s, Kelly became a founding member of an Irish folk band that would achieve legendary status, The Dubliners.

In his role as one of the two main voices in The Dubliners, Luke Kelly made an indelible impression upon Irish folk music. His interpretations of songs like ‘Scorn Not His Simplicity’ and ‘The Town I Loved So Well’ – both written by Phil Coulter – became landmark recordings.

A socialist by instinct, performing songs like ‘Springhill Disaster’, ‘For What Died The Sons of Roisin’ and the American ballad ‘Joe Hill’, Luke Kelly expressed a powerful social and political awareness. Kelly’s passion for words, for literature and for drama led to him giving full value to every syllable in every word, and to every note and nuance in a melody. But he was equally capable of injecting gusto into lusty ballads of the class of ‘The Black Velvet Band’, ‘Whiskey In The Jar’ and ‘Home Boys Home’.

The English musician, and writer of the mega-hit 'Streets of London', Ralph McTell, described his first encounter with Kelly at an English folk-club as a transformative experience. “This red-headed Irishman got up with a banjo, and pinned us all to the wall with his voice,” he recalled, after Kelly’s passing. “It was a bit scary, really, because I hadn’t thought anyone was taking music that seriously.”

As a poet, Patrick Kavanagh was so determined to be heard that he walked the 80 miles from Inniskeen, Co. Monaghan, to Dublin, to meet his future literary agent. The son of a shoemaker who owned a small farm he had – like Luke Kelly – left school very young, at the age of 12, and thereafter largely taught himself about literature. In landmark works like his debut collection The Ploughman and Other Poems, the semi-autobiographical novel Tarry Flynn, and in the epic poem The Great Hunger, Kavanagh honoured the people and landscapes of Ireland’s more impoverished rural areas. His work has long been admired as free from the sentiment of those who wrote of the rural poor having only known life in Ireland’s larger cities. He published the poem that would become ‘On Raglan Road’ in 1946.

It began life as a lyric poem, written following what has been described as "his doomed infatuation" with Hilda Moriarty, a young medical student from Dingle Co. Kerry, who was living and studying in Dublin. Kavanagh and Hilda both lived on the eponymous street, on the south side of the city, Raglan Road. They became friends, but while she enjoyed the famous poet’s company, the age gap – she was 22 and he 40 – was too great for her to become romantically involved. Hilda would go on to marry Donogh O’Malley, a star rugby player for Munster, as well as a future Fianna Fáil Minister for Education and a far more age-appropriate suitor. However, Kavanagh would continue to be a part of Moriarty’s life. Her son Darragh O’Malley later remembered Kavanagh as “a constant presence in the home.”

In the Patrick Kavanagh documentary, Gentle Tiger, Moriarty recalled that it was she who threw down the gauntlet at the feet of the poet – resulting in the creation of one of his most most widely loved works. “I upbraided him about his Tarry Flynn and his writing about cabbages and turnips and potatoes,” Hilda said with a wry smile. “He said he was a peasant poet.” Her eyes widened noticeably at the notion of such a romantic, self-elected title. “I said,” she went on, “‘You should write something else.’” In response, Kavanagh told her that he would write a poem for her some time – and he did. It was published under the title ‘Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away’: apparently in an effort to avoid embarrassment, the poet replaced Hilda’s name in the title with his brother Peter’s wife's name, Miriam.

But could you sing it? And what might the melody be? In folk music, no one thought twice about borrowing an air that was already out there – and thus it played out. The writer Benedict Kiely remembered Kavanagh singing the lyrics to the air of the ancient Irish tune ‘The Dawning Of The Day’ or, in Gaelic, ‘Fáinne Geal an Lae’ – which was written by the composer and harpist Thomas Connellan in the latter half of the 17th Century. Kavanagh is said to have sung it to Luke Kelly in the infamous Duke Street pub, The Bailey, in Dublin in the 1960s. Kelly subsequently recorded what is widely considered the definitive version with his group, The Dubliners. It has since been recorded by artists as varied as Sinéad O’Connor, Mark Knopfler, Billy Joel, Billy Bragg, Roger Daltrey of The Who, Mary Black, Van Morrison and Ed Sheeran, while it became an almost compulsory item in the repertoire of any self-respecting Irish act during the ballad boom of the late ‘60s. The Van Morrison version is especially noteworthy for the way in which it eschews the more formal rhythmic and melodic approach of the Luke Kelly original.

The song has also been used in films like In Bruges (starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson) and The Stag (in which it is sung by the Irish actor Andrew Scott).

Darragh O’Malley, son of Hilda Moriarty, would later recall a chance meeting with Luke Kelly at an Irish club in London. Darragh was there with his mother and Luke Kelly was in town with The Dubliners to play the Royal Albert Hall. Darragh recalls the leonine Kelly leaning in to his mother and telling her, “I’m going to sing your song tonight.”

Patrick Kavanagh died at the age of 63, in November 1967, before 'Raglan Road' was immortalised on record. Luke Kelly finally recorded the song with the Dubliners in 1971; it was included on their live album Hometown in 1972 and released as the B-Side of the single 'Scorn Not His Simplicity'. It has gone on to become one of Ireland's all-time classics. In 2019, 'Raglan Road' was selected as Ireland's Favourite Folk Song, in a national poll carried out by the State broadcaster, Radio Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ).