Bruce Springsteen had recorded an Irish anti-war song for his new folk album and plans to give the song its European debut in Dublin on May 5th.
The track, Mrs McGrath, was made popular by Irish rebels in 1916 and recalls an Irish mother's horror after her son's legs are amputated in a British foreign war.
The New York Times wrote this week that the song "carries powerful resonance in the era of Cindy Sheehan", the woman who camped outside Camp David and led a national anti-war campaign after her son was killed in Iraq.
Springsteen has been a strong opponent of the Iraq war and has called for President Bush to be impeached.
In the song, an Irish woman named Mrs McGrath is lured into allowing her son, Ted, to go to war on the promise that he will get to wear a nice uniform.
She rushes to greet her son after the war to find that he is "without any legs/ And in their place he had two wooden pegs". She is still so taken with military pride that she guesses he must have lost his legs while trying to walk on the sea but is told that he lost them in battle.
She turns against military pomposity with a final declaration: "All foreign wars I do proclaim/Between Don John and the King of Spain/And byjaysus I'll make them rue the time/That they swept the legs from a child of mine".
Coincidentally, the son tells his mother that he lost his legs on May 5th, the same day that Springsteen plays in Dublin.
According to the bible of American folk, John Anthony Scott's The Ballad of America, Mrs McGrath first appeared on a broadside published in Dublin as early as 1815, as a protest against the brutality of the Napoleonic war's peninsular campaign of 1808 to 1814.
Lesley Nelson-Burns, a world- renowned folk collector who runs the folk website contemplator.com, wrote that Mrs McGrath was sung by Irish Republicans before the first World War and was a popular song sung by the rebels during the 1916 Easter Rising.
Springsteen recorded it for We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, his new album honouring folk singer Pete Seeger, which is due to be released in the US on Tuesday.
• Tickets for the May 5th concert in the Point Depot sold out in seven minutes when they went on sale earlier this month.
Mrs McGrath: extract
Oh, Missis McGrath, the sergeant said,
Would you like to make a soldier out of your son, Ted?
With a scarlet coat, and a three-cocked hat,
Now Missis McGrath, wouldn't you like that?
Wid yer too-ri-aa, fol de diddle aa
Too-ri-oo-ri-oo-ri-aa . . .
Oh, Captain, dear, where have ye been
Have you been in the Meditereen?
Will ye tell me the news of my son, Ted?
Is the poor boy livin', or is he dead?
Wid yer too-ri-aa, fol de diddle aa
Too-ri-oo-ri-oo-ri-aa . . .
Oh, I wasn't drunk and I wasn't blind
But I left my two fine legs behind.
For a cannon ball, on the fifth of May,
Took my two fine legs from the knees away.
Wid yer too-ri-aa, fol de diddle aa
Too-ri-oo-ri-oo-ri-aa.