When you start going to Irish sessions, you might wonder the most popular Irish session tunes are you should know. The amount of jigs, reels and other tunes experienced session players know can be tremendous and you might feel a bit lost when you want to join the mob and you find out you just learned other tunes than the ones being played. This was at least my experience when I started going to Irish sessions with my tin whistle.
So what I did was noting down the tunes that were being played frequently and start practising these at home. So step by step I learned more and more popular Irish session tunes. This is my list with the most popular tunes, including the links to corresponding sheet music.
The most popular Irish session tunes
- A fig for a kiss
- Banish misfortune
- Cooley’s reel
- Congress reel
- Drowsy Maggie
- Gravel walk
- I Buried my wife and danced on her grave
- Kesh jig
- The Kid on the Mountain
- Morrison’s jig
- The musical priest
- Out on the ocean
- Saddle the pony
- St Anne’s reel
- The blarney pilgrim
- The butterfly
- The lilting banshee
- The maid behind the bar
- The silver spear
- The wind that shakes the barley