@oristarA,
The explanation of "Oho be the Hokey" is a bit convoluted but it essentially means "By God" or "by the Holy Ghost." Larry is intensifying his threat to kill the card cheat by bringing God into it. You've heard of swear words; this is how people used to swear.
We get the word "hokey" from the Latin phrase "Hoc est enum corpus meum" from the Catholic Mass which means "This is My Body," the words Christ is recorded to have said at the Last Supper. From that, less religious people twisted the meaning to give us "hocus-pocus" referring to any magical or unintelligible incantation, and, by mispronunciation, that phrase morphed into "hokey-pokey".
Essentially, by the late 1700s, a "hoke" was a "ghost" or "phantasm." We also get the word "hoax" from the same root.
"Scuttle your knob with me daddle," as someone on this thread said earlier, does indeed mean to punch someone so hard with one's daddle, or fist, that their knob, or head, becomes scuttled, or severed, from the head-owner's life-giving blood vessels. The modern equivalent might be "I'll knock your block off."
Larry complains "You cheat me because I'm in grief;" that is, the card cheat feels it is permissible to take Larry's money dishonestly, since Larry won't be needing it that much after the hanging the next day. ... "But soon I'll demolish your noddle." Again with the threat to knock the cheater's block off; Larry may be hot-headed but at least he's consistently so. ..."and leave you your claret to drink." This is a reference to all the blood that would be gushing out of a decapitated card cheat's neck were Larry to make good on his threat. This is not a church hymn, you see; it was written by a hard man about hard men and there's no pussyfooting about it.
"Then the clergy came in with his book and he spoke him so smooth and so civil."
This would be a reference, no doubt, to a Protestant minister of the time, who would have worn a "big wig" after the fashion at the English court in the 1780s or so. See the link.
http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/lookandlearn-preview/A/A003/A003830.jpg
Catholic priests not only didn't go in for that sort of look, they weren't exactly allowed to be in an English prison in Ireland in those days, except perhaps as inmates. The book the clergy came in with would be the Book of Common Prayer; Larry likely being a lower-class Irish prisoner (and therefore at least nominally a Roman Catholic), would not have any good word for a representative of what was seen as an oppressor religion.
"Larry tipped him a Kilmainham look." I've seen two explanations for this phrase: 1) He glowered at the clergyman, threateningly. 2) He gave the clergyman a look to draw him in closer to Larry, so that Larry could physically attack him. In other words, he faked the clergyman out. I tend to believe it's the first meaning, but we see from the song's next verse that Larry "pitched his big wig to the divvil", i.e. he got close enough to the clergyman to remove his hairpiece and throw it "to the devil" or beyond retrieval.
Next comes some sighing and swigging of liquor, before Larry pitifully sighs "O the hemp will be soon round me throttle" [the rope of the hangman's noose will soon be around Larry's throat] and "will choke his poor windpipe to death."
..."The throttler I thought I could kill him" is the singer expressing opprobrium for the hangman. "But Larry not one word did say, nor changed till he came to King William, then musha, his color grew white." This means Larry took the whole day stoically enough until the procession to the gallows passed a famous statue of King William of Orange nearby the venue for the hanging. [King William III was reviled in Catholic Ireland for removing the Catholic king James II from the throne (Battle of the Boyne 1690) and instituting harsh religious persecution thereafter against Catholic Ireland.]
But Larry didn't blanche because of seeing a long-dead king's statue per se. It was the proximity of the gallows that made him aware he was about to die.
"Musha" is an anglicization of the Irish word "muise" (pronounced "moosh-a" which means "indeed." So the verse means "then didn't Larry's face get pale indeed."
"When he came to the old nubblin' chit" is a reference to the gallows. Apparently how it worked was that the condemned was made to stand on the back of a wagon underneath the fulcrum where the noose was threaded. The noose was placed around the bound prisoner's neck and the horse pulling the wagon was goaded into moving away; the prisoner being held by the noose would now have no footing and would thus swing by the neck until dead.
"He was tucked up so neat and so pretty" means Larry was bound up hand and feet to prevent him from struggling or indeed escaping. This was a public execution meant to instill fear of and respect for the English rulers in the hearts and minds of the Irish onlookers, and it would not do if Larry dodged Jack Ketch. [Jack Ketch was a nickname for all hangmen, but there really was a hangman named Jack Ketch; he was Charles II's executioner in the 1680s and had a reputation for performing particularly gruesome and sadistic hangings, particularly of noblemen who displeased the king.]
"The rumbler jogged off from his feet" refers to the wagon being pulled out from under Larry's feet.
"And he died with his face to the city!" Here I think the singer is editorializing a bit, saying Larry faced death bravely, but it could just mean that he describes what position the body was in at the time of death.
"He kicked too but that was all pride, for soon you could see 'twas all over" means that as Larry was being asphyxiated, his body struggled to breathe and onlookers might interpret that struggle as a kick. But it was of no use.
"Soon after the noose was untied, and in darkness we waked him in clover, and sent him to take his ground sweat." This means Larry's friends received his body and by nightfall had brought him to the burial ground, where in the slang used by the singer, they "sent him to take his ground sweat", i.e. put him in a coffin and buried it.
This song, although revived by Elvis Costello, was, for most of the late 20th century, associated with the great Dublin street singer Frank Harte, whose version preserved the original slang "in darkey we waked him in clover." Costello, aiming at an American audience, no doubt realized that "darkey" has a more offensive slang meaning in the U.S. [it's a racial slur aimed at African-Americans] and so opted to change the cant word to "darkness." Either that or the record company, not needing controversy when it wanted cash instead, insisted on the change.
I am indebted to many sources for the information contained herein, including Wikipedia and the traditional lyric website Mudcat.org, but also to my personal research into this song and my readings of Hibernian English literature and Irish history. And to my mother, who often said "muise" when she could have said "indeed."
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