Ride On

The Story Behind The Song

Legendary songwriter Jimmy MacCarthy, from Macroom in Co. Cork, has two great fascinations: music and horses. So the stars were aligned when the two collided to produce a piece of pure folk-pop magic in ‘Ride On'. As the great-grandson of a successful horse trainer, MacCarthy spent his childhood either singing or “messing about with horses.” Despite leaving school at 15 to learn how to be a horse trainer, his love of music ultimately won out. Influenced by Paul Simon, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits, he learned to play guitar and keyboards and began composing songs on the piano. 

After releasing two singles, including ‘Miles of Eyes’, MacCarthy referenced his training days in a song that would prove career-defining. What is the song about? He has since explained on Radio Eireann that when they were training for races the younger horses would gallop behind the older ones, but as the younger ones developed, they needed the horses in front to go faster, so the jockeys would shout out ‘Ride On’. The phrase stuck in his mind. Maybe he knew it would come in handy someday.

But, of course it is about more than that. Folk myth held that the song was actually about not joining the IRA. That amounts to no more than conjecture. It is certainly about love lost and there are, if you look at it hard enough, the embers of an affair still burning and about to be extinguished. MacCarthy’s evocative lyrics – and the raw emotion they captured – found the perfect prophet in Christy Moore. Christy would write songs like ‘Ordinary Man’, 'Lisdoonvarna’ and ‘Joxer Goes to Stuttgart’ that became part of the Irish folk canon. However, as a founding member of both the hugely influential modern four-piece folk group Planxty, and the electric storm that were Moving Hearts, Christy – one of Ireland’s finest ever folk singers – had developed a reputation as an unparalleled interpreter of songs by other outstanding writers. He recorded ‘Ride On’ as the title track of his ninth album in 1984, delivering a version that seemed to distil the essence of sadness and loss in the song. It has endured and is still revered as one of Moore’s most popular songs of all time. 

While it may bother some writers that the best known versions of their songs are performed by other people, MacCarthy is not one of them. “If you’re a farmer you live with the weather,” he has said. “Whatever happens, happens. One thing that I learned from my mother was that it’s the making of things that’s precious – not counting the harvest while you’re still ploughing the land, you know? It’s a case of each job for its own sake and everything turns out as it should.”

Jimmy has since penned some of contemporary Irish music’s most famous songs, including ‘No Frontiers’, ‘Katie’, ‘Bright Blue Rose’, ‘The Contender’, ‘Mystic Lipstick’ and ‘Missing You’. But he has joked that he himself is ‘famous for not being famous’.

“For me the most important thing about a song is that it’s sung,” he said. While his compositions have since been performed variously by Mary Black, Mary Coughlan, Westlife, The Corrs, Celtic Tenors, Seán Keane, Paddy Reilly, Moving Hearts, Frances Black, The Fureys, Celtic Woman and many more, he has acknowledged that the passion that Moore brings to his performances made him the perfect person to deliver the dramatic gut-punching narrative of ‘Ride On’. 

“Take the very feral line ‘Run your claw along my gut one last time’. I actually believe that Christy would never have recorded ‘Ride On’ if it wasn't for that feral line,” he offered. “Christy likes feral language.”

MacCarthy told the Independent that the song is “about parting and the angst and the deep, gut-wrenching aspect of losing somebody or somebody leaving you or emigrating. So, it is as valid for Michael Collins and de Valera as it is for Johnny down the road, who has just split up with his girlfriend, or whose dad just died.”

Far from being a call to arms, the song is ultimately a rejection of violence. “It's about two people choosing separate paths, because one has a gun and the other can't go along because he doesn't believe in bloodshed. ‘I could never go with you/ No matter how I wanted to’.”

Speaking to Hot Press at the time of the album launch, Christy Moore said of the song: “It paints a very different picture for me. Of two lovers, one of whom is very politically oriented and wants to go a certain way, and the other person just can’t handle it, even though they, perhaps, would like to follow. But they can’t, maybe because of fear. ‘Ride On’ says to me: ‘I can’t do that, even though I’d love to be able to go with you the whole way. I just can’t. I can’t handle it’.”

Moore later added, in his book One Voice: "Many people wonder what it's about, but Jimmy MacCarthy keeps that to himself. All we need to know is what it means to us individually.” And therein lies the secret of its longevity – and that of many great and enduring songs.