26 September 1966
Here’s a factoid to squirrel away for your next table quiz: Dermot O’Brien won an All-Ireland senior football title as captain of Louth in 1957 and had an Irish number one single with ‘The Merry Ploughboy’ in 1966. We’re used to GAA stars topping the polls as politicians, but Dermot O’Brien is the first to top the charts as a singer – a popularity contest of a different order. This chart-topper wasn’t a cash-in on his All Ireland-winning status: he was a gigging musician by trade. What’s more, this version of ‘The Merry Ploughboy’ saw off two other versions in the Irish charts that same month to claim the top spot. Now there’s the winning mentality that gets you All-Ireland titles and Irish number ones, baby!
O’Brien’s record, with its musty accordion and square rhythm, is our first glimpse of the Irish céilí scene at number one. Like the showbands, céilí dances were a large part of whatever live music was available in ’60s provincial Ireland. However, this doesn’t mean Falla Luimní and The Siege Of Ennis were about to storm our charts, and the parallel with ‘Aon Focal Eile’—accordion singalong with competing versions in the same week’s chart—doesn’t make O’Brien a ’60s Richie Kavanagh. He and His Clubmen also had another single in the charts at the same time: a cover of Johnny Cash’s ‘I Walk The Line’ played in the standard country & Irish showband style. So, an old-time céilí sound and a singer’s All-Ireland sporting success turn out to be the strangeness on an Irish number one single.
The song itself, however, is business as usual for Ireland’s pop charts and pop culture in the 50th anniversary year of the Easter Rising: like ‘Black And Tan Gun’ a trad-style ballad, albeit more rousing with its rat-tat-tat snare, which romanticises our 1919-21 War of Independence against the British. The Thompson sub-machine gun named in the chorus was indeed used by the Irish forces – and then to greater fame (as the ‘Tommy gun’ with its distinctive round magazine drum) by American gangsters as depicted in Hollywood movies. So, ‘The Merry Ploughboy’ is another instance of Irish public discourse glamourising its recent violent past into respectability, and at the same time countering the contemporary tension up North with an Irish solution to an Irish problem: just block it out and instead keep fighting the Black and Tans in a mythical, heroic, everlasting 1920. Three versions of this song in the Irish charts at the same time, remember. Let’s march up to Dublin and fight the English; see y’all in Coppers!
