“Arthur McBride and the Sergeant” (1976) – Andy Irvine and Paul Brady * Traditional Arrangement with Additional Lyrics by Paul Brady * Produced by Donal Lunny * LP: Andy Irvine/Paul Brady * Label: Mulligan
“Arthur McBride and the Sergeant,” which goes back to 1840s Ireland, falls into the category of anti-war songs espousing violent catharsis, a la Bruce Cockburn’s “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” (1984). Here’s a synopsis of the tale it tells: The singer and his cousin Arthur McBride go out for a Christmas morning constitutional only to get aggressively recruited for enlistment by a sergeant, a corporal, and a “wee little drummer.” (You can get a visualization of such a recruitment scene, complete with drum, in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.) The meeting simmers into words, boils into rapiers and shillelaghs, then goes kaboom with Arthur and the singer delivering the final “hard clouts.” The soldiers’ rapiers get thrown in the sea, the drum gets kicked like a football, and the war mongers get left like “wet sacks” in return for spoiling an otherwise lovely outing.
The song goes back to 1840s Ireland, but came to Brady’s attention through a 1973 reprint of A Heritage of Songs, a book by a Maine collector named Carrie Grover. Although the track appeared on a now-classic duo album with Andy Irvine, it’s all Brady on voice and guitar. Many covers using his reworked version of the lyrics happened in its wake, including one by Bob Dylan in the early ’90s.