Thin Lizzy – Whiskey in the Jar
About The Song
“Whiskey in the Jar,” a song about a notorious Irish highwayman Patrick Fleming who was hanged in 1650, has become one of Ireland’s most beloved songs, a true rebel air that stirs the passions.
Fleming was no hero. He murdered, robbed, and maimed rich and poor alike, including women and children before being hunted down. He made a legendary escape from his death cell by scrambling up a chimney but was eventually recaptured. In death, he acquired a heroic air and many poems were written about him.
Historian Alan Lomax says songs of highwaymen attacking the agents of the crown were very popular with Irish and British peasants.
The folk of 17th-century Britain liked and admired their local highwaymen, and in Ireland (or Scotland) where the gentlemen of the roads robbed English landlords, they were regarded as national patriots. Such feelings inspired this rollicking ballad.
Not surprisingly given mass emigration, the song was exported to America probably by Irish indentured servants and several different versions of it can still be heard in the South today.
The song appeared in wording very close to its modern version in a ballad called “The Sporting Hero,” or “Whiskey in the Bar,” in a mid-1850s broadsheet.
During the American Civil War the famed Fighting 69th, composed of almost all Irish, adopted the song as their own anthem but changed the lyrics and called the song “We’ll Fight for Uncle Sam.”
The song first gained wide exposure when Irish folk band the Dubliners performed it internationally as a signature song, and recorded it on three albums in the 1960s. In the U.S., the song was popularised by the Highwaymen, who recorded it on their 1962 album Encore. Irish rock band Thin Lizzy hit the Irish and British pop charts with the song in 1973.
