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I was born in a Dublin street,
Where the Royal drums do beat,
And the loving English feet they tramped all over us;
And each and every night when me father'd come home tight,
He'd invite the neighbours outside with this chorus:
Oh, come out you black and tans,
Come out and fight me like a man,
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders;
Tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away,
From the green and lovely lanes in Killeshandra.
Come let me hear you tell
How you slammed the brave Parnell,
When you taught him well and truly persecuted;
Where are the snears and jeers that you bravely let us hear,
When our heroes of sixteen were executed.
Ah, come out you black and tans,
Come out and fight me like a man,
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders;
Tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away,
From the green and lovely lanes in Killeshandra.
Come tell us how you slew them poor Arabs two by two,
Like the Zulus they had spears and bows and arrows;
How you bravely faced each one,
With your sixteen pounder gun,
And you frightened them poor natives to their marrow.
Ah, come out you black and tans,
Come out and fight me like a man,
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders;
Tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away,
From the green and lovely lanes in Killeshandra.
The day is coming fast and the time is here at last,
When each yeoman will be cast aside before us;
And if there be a need,
Sure my kids will sing, "Godspeed!"
With a verse or two of Steven Beehan's chorus:
Ah, come out you black and tans,
Come out and fight me like a man,
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders;
Tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away,
From the green and lovely lanes in Killeshandra.
Dominic Behan wrote this Irish rebel song, referring to the British paramilitary police auxiliary force in Ireland during the 1920s, as a tribute to his father Stephen, to whom authorship of the song is often attributed.
This variant arranged and recorded by Paddy Reilly formerly of the Dubliners from 1996-2005 (20 Golden Irish Ballads, Dolphin Records, 2000).
A variant was arranged and recorded as The Black And Tans by the Irish Descendants (Blooming Bright Star, 2000; We Are The Irish Descendants, 2004).
See more songs by the Irish Descendants.
Notes:
¹ Killeshandra (Cill na Seanrètha, meaning Church of the Old Forts) is a town in County Cavan, Ireland. In 1841 the town had a population of over 12,500 but today it is less than 500.
² After World War I, many veterans could not find work, some because of the country's economic depression, others because of psychological trauma. The British government enlisted a number of these unemployed men to serve as police in Ireland at 20 shillings per day. There was a shortage of complete black police uniforms, so the government added pieces from tan army uniforms. This led to the nickname Black and Tans, who ruthlessly enforced the law.
³ From Wikipedia: Charles Stewart Parnell [1846-1891] was an Irish Protestant landowner, nationalist political leader, land reform agitator, Home Rule MP in the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and founder and leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party. He was one of the most important figures in 19th century Ireland and Great Britain and described by Prime Minister William Gladstone as the most remarkable person he had ever met. Another future Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, described him as one of the three or four greatest men of the nineteenth century, while Lord Haldane described him as the strongest man the British House of Commons had seen in 150 years.
