Puirt: Gaelic music lyrics

This page contains lyrics of traditional songs in the Scottish and Irish Gaelic languages, as well as links to videos of performances of those songs.

Most of the songs contained here are puirt à beul (literally "tunes from a mouth"). This is a singing style traditionally sung a capella, in circumstances where instruments were not available, though it is often accompanied by instruments in modern performances. Like other Irish and Scottish music styles, these songs are usually performed in sets, typically of two or three songs in sequence. The lyrics are usually light-hearted, and meant more for their rhythm than lyrical depth. They can be veritable tongue twisters, though, especially when sung in a fast pace, as they often are.

Some of these are waulking songs. Those songs were traditionally sung by women while waulking woolen cloth (beating the cloth to soften it); the song was used to coordinate the rhythm of the work. Those have typically longer lyrics, with a repeating chorus after or around each verse.

The lyrics presented in this page come from various sources; I have indicated the source(s) I consulted for each song. As is often the case in traditional folk songs, there can be a lot of variation between versions of a given song. Sometimes entire verses are present in a version and absent in another, or appear in a different order, so there can be discrepancies between a given performance of the song and the various text sources. In those cases I have tried to adapt the text to match more closely the versions in the videos.

In other cases, there are more subtle differences. Sometimes a word or two appear in a version and not in another. Sometimes there are small grammatical differences, most likely the result of dialectal variation. The most common case is for a word to be lenited in a version and not in another (e.g., mhòr vs. mòr). In general I have left those discrepancies as is; I just don't know enough Gaelic to make those changes confidently. However, once one gets used to the sounds and orthography of the languages, it becomes easier to spot those cases.

Puirt à beul songs generally don't have proper titles: they are usually named after their first line. Because of this, puirt à beul performances on the web often don't specify the names of the songs being performed, which makes it harder to find lyrics if you don't speak Gaelic. Many of the lyrics presented here I have only found after repeatedly listening to a given song, trying to discern a word or two, and trying my luck with a search engine, or staring at the Puirt a Beul page at celticlyricscorner.net and trying to figure which of those songs could be the one I'm looking for. By putting all the lyrics in a single page, the process of searching for isolated words becomes easier.

Gaelic orthography can be offputting to the non-initiated. Back when I started looking up those lyrics I actually had a hard time even identifying that the text I was looking at actually corresponded to the song I was listening to, especially in the faster-paced songs. This guide on Scottish Gaelic pronunciation is the most comprehensive guide I know. If you have some knowledge of phonetics/phonology, the Wikipedia pages on Scottish Gaelic phonology and orthography and the corresponding pages on Irish phonology and orthography can also help.

With all that said, enjoy your puirt!

I believe all these traditional song lyrics to be in the public domain. If you hold the rights to some of these lyrics and want me to remove them or provide additional credit, contact me.

To the extent possible under law, the author has dedicated all copyright and related and neighboring rights to this document to the public domain worldwide. See https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ for more information.