A large oil painting on canvas from 1833 by Daniel Maclise (1806–1870) depicts a Halloween house party where a tambourine-style bodhrán features clearly.

The bodhrán is struck with the back of the player's hand, as is sometimes still done, rather than with a cipín, also known in English as a "tipper.” In remote parts of the south-west, the "poor man's tambourine" – made from farm implements and without the jingles – was in popular use among mummers, or wren boys.

The second wave roots revival of Irish traditional music in the 1960s and 1970s brought virtuoso bodhrán playing to the forefront, when it was further popularized by bands such as Ceoltóirí Chualann and The Chieftains.

In the 1970s, virtuoso players such as The Boys of the Lough's Robin Morton, The Chieftains' Peadar Mercier, Planxty's Christy Moore, Tommy Hayes of Stockton's Wing and De Dannan's Johnny "Ringo" McDonagh further developed playing techniques.

Although most common in Ireland, the bodhrán has gained popularity throughout the Celtic music world, especially in Scotland, Cape Breton, North mainland Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Prince Edward Island.

In the South West of England a similar instrument made from the frame of a garden sieve was once popular and known as a Riddle Drum.

In Cornish traditional music they are called a crowdy-crawn;[19] the use of this instrument to store odds and ends led to the name also being used to mean "miscellaneous".

The drum is struck either with the bare hand or with a lathe-turned piece of wood called a bone, tipper, beater, stick or cipín.

Tippers were originally fashioned from a double-ended knuckle bone, but are now commonly made from ash, holly, or hickory wood.

[20] The drum is usually played in a seated position, held vertically on the player's thigh and supported by their upper body and arm (usually on the left side, for a right-handed player), with the hand placed on the inside of the skin where it is able to control the tension (and therefore the pitch and timbre) by applying varying amounts of pressure and also the amount of surface area being played, with the back of the hand against the crossbar, if present.

Top-end players move the skin hand from the bottom and towards the top of the drum to generate increasingly high pitches.

The bodhrán player must stick to this rhythm but is free to improvise within the structure: most simply, they may enunciate the first beat of four, making a sound like ONE two three four ONE two three four; but they can syncopate, put in double pulses, according to the rhythmic characteristics of the tunes being played.

Because the bodhrán typically plays 16th notes (Kerry style), a great deal of variety can be introduced by these syncopations and the use of rests.

Combined with manual pitch changes and naturally occurring tonal variations in an animal skin drumhead, the bodhrán can almost sound as melodically expressive as other non-percussive instruments.

This was invented by Seamus O'Kane, from Dungiven, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, to combat the damp conditions of Donegal in 1975.