"The Wearing of the Green", in Gaelic "Caitead An Glas" is an Irish air or march in 4/4 time and G Major.
As a march, the parts are played AB (Sweet) or AAB (O'Neill).
Bayard (1981) notes that (Anne Geddes) Gilchrist and Moffat have identified this air as a descendent of an old Scots air called "The Tulip", a march composed by James Oswald and appearing in his c. 1747 Airs for the Spring. Ernest MacMillan identifies it as "Balance a Straw" from a 1759 instrumental setting. The melody has been the vehicle for numerous songs, including "The Rising of the Moon".
The title "Wearing of the Green" first appeared on a political broadside of 1798, the year of the Rebellion and a “Wearing of the Green” song was published in The Citizen in 1841. However, the most famous text of the song comes from a play called Arrah-na-Pogue, produced in Dublin in 1864 and New York in 1865. The stage version lyrics were rewritten by Dion Boucicault (1820-1890), “to an old melody,” at the suggestion of his mother. The tune itself is printed in Havety's One Hundred Irish Airs, 2nd series, (1859). In Scotland the melody is used for the song "Sae Will We Yet,” an end-of-evening song.
The ‘wearing of the green’ refers to the outlawed green cockade worn by the Irish rebels, an adaptation of the French cockade and Tree of Liberty of the 1789 revolution. Redfern Mason wrote in his Song Lore of Ireland (1910):
"There is, in true national poetry an accent of sincerity which goes straight to the heart and cannot be imitated...nowhere does it ring with a more pathetic thrill than in "Wearing of the Green". The writer was a lad when he first heard it sung in Boucicault's Arrah na Pogue (1865)...Because it was sung in Boucicault's drama, many people have imagined that the clever playwright wrote it. But nobody can claim its authorship. It is an inspired street ballad, born of the sorrow and bitterness of the people."
It was printed in O'Neill's O’ Neill’s Irish Music (1915), O'Neill's Music of Ireland: 1850 Melodies (1903), Sweet's Fifer’s Delight (1965).
John McCormack recorded the Dion Boucicault version in 1912 for Victor Records. It was issued in the United States and England and remained in the company’s catalog into the 1950's.
Songs from Irish uprisings and rebellion in this collection are:
"Bold Fenian Men"
"Boulavogue"
"The Boyne Water"
"The Boys of Kilmichael"
"Croppies Lie Down"
"The Croppy Boy"
"Kevin Barry"
"The Old Orange Flute"
"The Protestant Boys"
"The Rising of the Moon"
"The Wind That Shakes the Barley"