The pub session feels immemorial — a few players in the corner, no stage, no tickets, tunes handed round as if they had always been handed round there. In fact the arrangement is largely a creation of the twentieth century, and its history explains a great deal about how sessions behave today.
Before the pub: kitchens, crossroads and halls
For most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Irish traditional music was functional dance music played where people danced: in houses, at crossroads in summer, in barns, at weddings and wakes and American wakes for departing emigrants. A house dance needed one or two musicians, a cleared floor and somebody to keep order. Music was local in the strong sense — you played what the people around you played, in the style of your own district, learned from the person in the next chair.
Pubs were part of social life, but they were not the natural venue for music. Licensed premises were for drinking; dancing happened elsewhere, and the two were not usually combined.
The 1935 Dance Halls Act
A single piece of legislation is generally credited with breaking that pattern. The Public Dance Halls Act of 1935 required that public dances be held in halls holding a dance licence granted by the District Court — a measure driven by a mixture of clerical anxiety about unsupervised dancing, concerns about safety, and revenue. Its practical effect was to push dancing out of houses and crossroads and into commercial halls run by people who could obtain a licence.
Historians argue about how completely it did this, and house dances did not vanish overnight. But the direction of travel was clear: dancing became something you paid to attend, in a hall, to a group loud enough to fill it. Solo fiddlers were no use in a hall of two hundred people. The céilí band — several melody instruments in unison, piano vamping underneath, drums keeping everyone honest — was the format that answered the problem, and it dominated Irish dance music for decades.
Records, emigration, and hearing outside your own parish
Something else was reshaping the music at the same time. Emigrant musicians in the United States were recording commercially from the 1920s, and those records travelled back. The Sligo fiddler Michael Coleman, recording in New York, became enormously influential in Ireland itself — one man's highly ornamented style spreading far beyond the district that produced it, because it was the version people could buy and copy.
Emigration cut both ways. It stripped players out of Irish towns for generations, but it also built thriving Irish music scenes in London, Boston, New York and Chicago, often centred on pubs and dance halls, and those scenes fed players, tunes and ideas back home. A good deal of what is now assumed to be immemorially local came home in a suitcase.
1951 onwards: organising the tradition
By mid-century traditional music had real problems: it was unfashionable, associated with poverty and the past, and losing ground to dance-band and popular music. The founding of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann in 1951 was a deliberate response — a national organisation to teach, promote and organise the music, with a competition structure and a festival, the Fleadh Cheoil, at its centre.
The fleadh mattered for a reason its founders did not entirely intend. Thousands of musicians gathered in one town for a weekend needed somewhere to play between competitions, and the somewhere was the pubs. Informal playing in licensed premises, by musicians from every county at once, became the most exciting part of the weekend. That model — strangers with a shared repertoire sitting down together in a pub — is recognisably the modern session.
The 1960s revival, and the session becoming normal
Two currents converged in the 1960s. Seán Ó Riada's work, particularly with Ceoltóirí Chualann, gave traditional material a new prestige and an arranged, listenable concert form; the group's players went on to form The Chieftains. Simultaneously the ballad boom — driven by the international success of The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem and then The Dubliners — made Irish song commercially huge and put guitars and banjos into pubs everywhere.
Publicans noticed that music brought custom. Musicians noticed that pubs would have them. By the 1970s, when groups like Planxty and The Bothy Band were making traditional music genuinely fashionable among young audiences, the pub session was established as the default habitat of the tradition — informal, unticketed, participatory, and paid for indirectly across the bar.
Why it survived
Plenty of folk traditions in Europe did not survive the twentieth century in living form. The Irish session did, and for reasons that are worth naming.
- The economics are unusually forgiving. A session needs no stage, no PA, no ticketing and no production. A pub can host one for the price of a couple of modest fees, and a bad night costs almost nothing. That resilience is why sessions outlast recessions that close venues.
- It is participatory. Anyone who learns the tunes can join. A tradition you can take part in renews itself in a way that a tradition you can only watch does not.
- It was organised in time. Teaching structures, competitions, summer schools and local branches meant that when the music became fashionable again there were young players ready, and when it went quiet there were classes keeping it alive.
- The repertoire is shared, not owned. Because thousands of tunes are held in common, players who have never met can perform together immediately. Few traditions have that.
- Tourism helped and distorted it. Visitor demand pays for enormous amounts of live traditional music, particularly in the west. It also produces rooms where the music is decoration. Both things are true at once, and Irish musicians have been arguing about it for fifty years.
What has changed lately
The last twenty-five years have been harder on the pub than on the music. Rural pub closures, changes in drinking habits, insurance and running costs, and the long tail of the pandemic have all reduced the number of rooms available, while the standard of playing has, if anything, risen. Some of the tradition has migrated: to arts centres and concert halls, to festivals, to teaching organisations, and to recorded and streamed music. Meanwhile a wave of artists has taken traditional song and tune into ambitious concert-scale work that fills theatres.
The session persists anyway, for the reasons above, and it remains one of the most common forms of live music on the island. It just moves more than it used to — which is precisely why we list what is on tonight rather than publishing a fixed weekly grid.
Hearing the history for yourself
If this interests you, the useful next step is to notice the layers in a room. The céilí-band legacy is audible whenever a set-dancing night is on. The ballad boom is audible in every pub with a guitar and a chorus. The fleadh tradition is audible in a session where nobody has met before and it works anyway. Our guide to telling Irish music apart maps those strands, the session guide explains the room itself, and the festival calendar tells you when the big gatherings fall.
Then go: Explore covers all 32 counties, and the city guides are the fastest way into a local scene.