Thin Lizzy – Whiskey In The Jar

Eric Bell wrote that riff imitating uilleann pipes off a borrowed cassette.

The cassette belonged to Phil Lynott and it was a Chieftains record, which is not where anyone would look for the opening of a hard rock single. Eric Bell had been handed a job he did not want — a traditional song the band had been messing about with, which their manager was convinced could be a hit — and he needed a way to make it his. He found it in the uilleann pipes. The long sustained notes that open Whiskey in the Jar, the phrase that has been played by every guitarist who ever picked the thing up since, are Bell’s version of a pipe drone.

Keep watching: Thin Lizzy – The Boys Are Back in Town

Nobody in the band wanted it out. Thin Lizzy had been going three years by late 1972, had two albums behind them and nothing resembling a hit, and Lynott had a clear idea of what should come next: Black Boys on the Corner, which he had written. He argued for it with Decca and he argued for it with management, and he lost both times. Manager Ted Carroll had heard them knocking the traditional song around, decided it was the one, and Decca — needing something on the radio before a UK tour supporting Slade — put it out over the band’s objections.

The song itself is centuries older than any of them. Folklorists have traced it to the seventeenth century, and it tells of a highwayman who robs an army captain and is then handed to the authorities by the woman he trusted with the money. The Dubliners had recorded it in 1967 and it was already a standard in Ireland. What nobody had done was play it like this.

Three men, one take at a folk song

Nick Tauber produced it. The band was a trio — Lynott on bass and vocals, Bell on guitar, Brian Downey on drums — and the arrangement leaves each of them exposed in a way a bigger lineup would have covered. Downey plays it straight and hard, refusing the lilt the song usually gets. Lynott sings it in his own accent, which sounds unremarkable now and was not at all unremarkable on British radio in 1972. And Bell’s guitar carries the melody the whole way through rather than accompanying it.

It went to No. 6 in Britain. In Ireland it reached No. 1 and sat there for seventeen weeks, which is a length of time that stops being a chart run and becomes a fact of national life. Decca, having got its way, pushed it with a stunt — miniature bottles of Powers relabelled with the band’s name, sent out to press and radio. Black Boys on the Corner went on the B-side, where it has stayed.

The song that outran the band that made it

Bell was gone within a year, leaving on the last night of 1973, and Thin Lizzy rebuilt around twin lead guitars and became a different and much larger band. The riff he left behind kept going without him. U2 played it. Gary Moore played it. Simple Minds and Belle & Sebastian recorded it. Metallica’s 1998 version won a Grammy, and it is Bell’s arrangement they are playing, not the traditional one — everyone who covers this song is covering Thin Lizzy.

Phil Lynott was born on August 20, 1949 in West Bromwich, to an Irish mother from Dublin and a father from British Guiana, and was raised in Crumlin by his grandmother. He formed the band in 1969 with Downey, a friend from his first group, and Bell. He wrote almost everything they recorded, published two books of poetry, and was the first Black Irishman to become a rock star in a country that had never had one. He died on January 4, 1986, at thirty-six. There has been a statue of him off Grafton Street in Dublin since 2005, and people leave things at the foot of it.

He never did get his way about the single. The song he wanted released is on the back of the one that made them, and the one that made them was three hundred years old and belonged to nobody.

The band also played it on Musikladen, the Radio Bremen programme that had taken over from Beat-Club and inherited its studio, its production team and its habit of filming performances properly rather than treating them as filler.