Wearing of the Green

An anonymous Irish street ballad born of the 1798 Rebellion, when wearing green marked one as a United Irishmen sympathizer — “they are hanging men and women for the wearing of the green.” The title appears on a 1798 political broadside and a version was printed in The Citizen in 1841, but the universally known text is Dion Boucicault’s, rewritten for his play Arrah-na-Pogue (Dublin 1864, New York 1865), which replaces defiance-at-home with emigration to America in its closing verse. Scholarship traces the air itself back further still, possibly to James Oswald’s Scots march “The Tulip” (c. 1747), and the melody carries other songs including “The Rising of the Moon.” John McCormack recorded the Boucicault version for Victor in 1912, and it stayed in the catalog for four decades.