Just Irish Music

The Croppy Boy is one of the most haunting and sorrow-filled rebel ballads to survive from the 1798 Rebellion. It tells the personal story of a young Irish volunteer — a “croppy,” named for the cropped hair worn by the United Irishmen — who stands proud for Ireland, only to be betrayed, condemned, and executed. Unlike the big broad histories of empires and armies, this ballad is intimate. It speaks through the voice of one doomed man — and through him, it speaks for thousands. The imagery in the lyrics is devastatingly direct. The song begins in the bright freshness of spring — birds singing, Ireland seemingly alive with hope — but the mood shifts instantly as the Yeoman cavalry seize him and drag him before Lord Cornwall. From there, the betrayal tightens like a noose: not only soldiers, not only magistrates, but his own kin turn against him. A cousin sells his life for a single guinea. A father denies him on the gallows. His mother tears her hair in grief. The tragedy is...

The Fenian Boy — The True Story of Billy Byrne of Ballymanus The Fenian Boy is a ballad rooted not in legend or romantic invention, but in hard Irish history. Billy Byrne of Ballymanus was a living man — a Wicklow farmer, born into ordinary soil, who made an extraordinary choice during the Rising of 1798. When the Crown demanded loyalty, when neighbours took the oath to save their own lives and livelihoods, Billy refused. He would not kneel. He would not sign. He would not surrender his country for safety or coin. The story of Billy Byrne has survived not because he led armies — but because he embodied the quiet, stubborn integrity that terrified empires more than muskets ever could. While his own brother swore the redcoat oath, Billy would rather face the scaffold than confess submission. For that defiance he was betrayed — not by an English rifle, but by whiskey-loosened tongues and fearful men in dark corners. He was dragged to Wicklow Gaol, tried in haste, and hanged in 1799. H...

The Echo of Sixteen — A Ballad Remembering the 1916 Rising The Echo of Sixteen is an original Irish ballad that honours the leaders, volunteers, and ordinary citizens who stood against the British Empire in the Easter Rising of 1916. It is a song set not in myth, but in the real streets of Dublin — where history shifted in smoke, blood, and fire. The ballad opens with the city stirring to rebellion in Easter Week. From the soot-blackened tenements to the granite pillars of the General Post Office , the Citizen Army and Irish Volunteers raised the green flag and claimed the right of a nation to exist. The song invokes the names that still command reverence — Patrick Pearse , James Connolly , Thomas MacDonagh , Joseph Plunkett — but it never forgets the unnamed men, the young messengers, the women who ran dispatches under fire, and the civilians caught in the crossfire. They were the people who, in that moment, believed Ireland could be free. The verses echo the devastation of t...

Whispers from the Coffin Ships — A Great Famine Ballad of Exile, Silence & the Sea Whispers from the Coffin Ships is a haunting Irish famine ballad set during the darkest years of 1845–1852 — when millions of Irish souls were starved out of their homeland, and another million fled across the Atlantic on vessels so deadly they were remembered not as emigrant ships, but as coffin ships . This piece stands as a lament for those who left Ireland half-alive, and those who never arrived at all. The ballad blends acoustic guitar, tin whistle, and violin to paint a bleak but truthful picture of forced emigration — cottages left in ruin, families torn from hearth and kin, children dying from fever before landfall, and the cold indifference of empire. Each verse is rooted in history: seized crops, sealed grain stores, mass evictions, and landscapes scarred by famine roads. In this interpretation, human-directed AI visuals deepen the storytelling — pairing every lyric with imagery of salt-...