In Song
The caubeen receives mention in the Irish song "The Wearing of the Green", of which the best-known version was written by Dion Boucicault for his 1864 play Arragh na Pogue, or the Wicklow Wedding, set in County Wicklow during the 1798 rebellion. The following is the second verse of Dion Boucicault's version:
When the law can stop the blades of grass
From growing as they grow,
And when the leaves in summer time
Their verdure dare not show,
Then I will change the colour
I wear in my caubeen,
But till that day I'll stick for aye
To wearing of the green.
An old song, still popular in Ireland, is "The Golden Jubilee" (or "Fifty Years Ago"), in which a wife exhorts her husband to take off his hat and put on his "ould caubeen", which he had worn fifty years previously. It was recorded by Connie Foley and Dorothy McManus in the 1940s and later by Sean Dunphy.
Another Irish song referring to the caubeen is "My Old White Caubeen", which the Irish Times reported was sung at a meeting of the RIC in 1901.
Read more about this topic: Caubeen
Famous quotes containing the word song:
“They seldom looked happy. They passed one another without a word in the elevator, like silent shades in hell, hell-bent on their next look from a handsome stranger. Their next rush from a popper. The next song that turned their bones to jelly and left them all on the dance floor with heads back, eyes nearly closed, in the ecstasy of saints receiving the stigmata.”
—Andrew Holleran (b. 1943)
“but you are not deaf,
you pick out
your own song from the uproar
line by line,
and at last throw back
your head and sing it.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)