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Well, were you drunk or were you blind
To leave your two fine legs behind?
Or was it from sailing upon the sea
That took your legs from the ground to the knee?

First published in 1876, “Mrs. McGrath” dates from the Peninsular War and appeared as a Dublin broadside in 1815. Its narrative is simple and lyrics vary little between versions. A British sergeant flatters Mrs. McGrath with images of her son in military garb (“…a scarlet coat with a big cocked cap/Mrs. McGrath, wouldn’t you like that?”), then recruits him. Seven years pass without word of his fate, when a ship arrives and sets him ashore – alive but minus his legs. Mother and son lament his injuries in a grimly comic dialogue wherein she asserts that she’d rather have her son “as he used to be/Than the king of France and his whole navy.” “My Son John” cuts the lyric in half, dispensing with all framing narrative and doubling the song’s tension by reducing it to a terse, rueful, first person exchange about the boy’s lost legs, ruined future, and the folly of war. In both variants, a sing-along chorus of nonsense syllables (“non-lexical vocables” is the musicological term) follows each verse.

Tommy Makem: “Mrs. McGrath” (1961)Well known in Ireland (where it achieved anthemic status during the 1916 Easter Rebellion), “Mrs. McGrath” was rarely heard in America before the mid-century folk revival. Early recordings by The Weavers, Burl Ives, and Tommy Makem are lively but rather stiff and twee – too cheery to register as serious anti-war statements. Ives extolled the song’s “use of wit to paint tragedy and make the telling bearable,” but to modern ears the softened blow of these renditions packs little punch. Makem’s version is expertly performed, but far too mannered (e.g., the ritardando that accompanies Mrs. McGrath’s closing lament – a bitter or keening cry in better versions) to raise much emotion.

Bruce Springsteen: “Mrs. McGrath” (2006)Newer versions – by Bruce Springsteen, Fiddler’s Green, The Stanfields – fare better by jettisoning the ballad’s pub song qualities and darkening its ambience. Springsteen slows his to a near dirge and sings in a quiet, gruff voice over martial percussion and Irish instruments, while the latter two bands – a generation younger – speed the song up and raise its rock quotient with distorted guitars. All three return some bite to the song but also weigh it down with self-consciousness. Springsteen’s version in particular feels like an art piece – its dramatic effects well orchestrated and intended, but contrived.

Tim Hart & Maddy Pryor: “My Son John” (1976)I wasn’t drunk and I wasn’t blind
To leave my two fine legs behind
Was a cannonball on the fifth of May
Took my two fine legs away

“My Son John” is perhaps better suited for modern times, its “less is more” reductionism akin, in its way, to both Ramones-style minimalism and Beckett-esque existential bleakness. Tim Hart and Maddy Prior’s 1976 version (on Folk Songs of Old England, Vol. 2) models the song’s strengths: with nothing but guitar and their own striking voices in close harmony, the pair (ironically best known for their band Steeleye Span’s ornate arrangements of traditional material) let the words and tune speak for themselves. The result is mesmerizing – a pared-down blend of both that echoes in the mind long after the song’s Spartan minute-and-a-half duration.

More recent renditions – by Lew Bear, The Imagined Village (who update the song for the “war on terror”), even actor-singer John C. Reilly – make the song new in ways worth hearing, but none so boldly as the 1989 interpretation by Boiled in Lead. No other treatment updates the song so skillfully while simultaneously staying true to its centuries-old roots – restoring the passion and political sting that must have animated the song over a century ago by restoring some of its underlying rage and terror.

Boiled in Lead: “My Son John” (1989)

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