from Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream.
Here is a selection of Irish-American songs from the early days of vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley. Most of them were discussed in my book Twas only an Irishman’s Dream. I recorded most of these with Ms Julie Petrin at the piano.
The Pre-Vaudeville Stage Irishman
The first two songs, “Larry O’Gaff” and “The Fine Ould Irish Gintelman,” give us a glimpse of the comic but sentimentalized stage Irish peasant as he had evolved by the early decades of the nineteenth century in the years before vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley. This version of the stage Irishman would have been very common in minstrel shows, as well as in imported Irish comedies and single acts.
“Larry O’Gaff (A Comic Irish Song) as performed by Jack Welch” was published by Ditson of Boston sometime between 1844 and 1857. The lack of copyright suggests that it originated in London or Dublin and was pirated in America. The song give us a picturesque Paddy who is frequently in trouble but who always lands on his feet.
“The Fine Ould Irish Gintelman,” published by Reed of Boston in 1845, is also an import. In this case, however, it is the composer/performer who came across the Atlantic. John Brougham, Dublin-born actor and playwright, had a long and important career on the American stage. His song is one of many parodies of an earlier song, “The Fine Old English Gentleman.” Even more than “Larry O’Gaff”, the “Gintleman” comically exploits the negative stereotype of the Irishman who happily accepted poverty as long as a good quota of fighting, drinking and praties came with it. Written decades before “Tim Finnegan’s Wake,” Brougham’s song suggests the ressurective powers of whiskey.
The Stage-Irish American
“Is That Mr. Reilly?” published in New York by Harding in 1887, retains much of the traditional Irish stereotype transferred from the dreams of an Irish peasant to the fantasies of an Irish-American workingman. Pat Rooney, the composer, was born in Birmingham, England, in 1844, and emigrated to America. By the 1880s he was one of the leading clog dancers on the New York stage. There were two other Pat Rooneys, son and grandson. They all danced, and when the third Pat Rooney died in the 1970s, a century-long tradition of Irish-American song-and-dance men came to an end. Rooney’s “Is That Mr. Reilly” may have pleased the Irish in the audience with its wild visions of a Paddy in the White House, but its humor may have been a bit over the top for the Yankees. The line about teaching “the Chinese how to die” reflects the keen antagonism felt by many Irish workingmen in America towards the cheap, imported Chinese labor. The song was plagiarized and revived around World War One, when a few old-timers wrote to the newspapers to reclaim the song for Rooney’s memory.
John W. Kelly’s “Throw’em Down M’Closkey” (New York: Harris, 1890) was a big hit, but not for its composer. Kelly, known as “The Rolling Mill Man,” was a gifted comedian, song writer and drinker. Short of cash one day, he sold the song for a couple of bucks to the great lady baritone Maggie Cline of Irish-German extraction. Maggie made the song her own by tipping the stage hands to throw down sand bags, bricks, lumber, or whatever was laying about back stage, whenever she sang the line “Throw’em Down M’Closkey.” The story line about a boxing match between an Irishman and an African-American is another bit of reality reflected on the vaudeville stage. The term “negro” used in this recording is not precisely the word used in the original song sheet.
C. F. Horn, who wrote “Miss Mulligan’s Home Made Pie” (Milwaukee: Rohlfling, 1883) seemed to specialize in this particular type of song in which an Irish family, seeking to establish itself on the next rung of the socio-economic ladder, throws a party only to see it degenerate into a full-blown Donnybrook. There were hundreds of such pieces in which is the negative stereotype of the Irish is much in evidence. Yet, the nineteenth-century Irish-American working class seems to have loved these songs. After 1900, however, the Irish were quick to leave song’s like “Miss Mulligan’s Home Made Pie” behind as they moved into the middle class. If Horn’s is the original of this song, then a sort of folk process was at work in the transatlantic music hall-vaudeville tradition, which produced several versions on both sides of the ocean.
The only printed versions of “When the Breakers Start Up On Full Time” are those produced by folklorist George Korsen, who collected the song in the 1930s in the anthracite fields of northern Pennsylvania. No doubt the work of a local “minstrel of the mine patch,” the song probably never appeared in sheet music form. Yet the structures of lyrics and tune are very much within the vaudeville style of the 1880s and 1890s. It is a strange song, satiric in intent; yet its fantasies of a miner’s wife, dreaming of all the things she will buy when the mines return to full production, cut very close to the bone. I sing the song a cappella, which is how I learned it from the singing of Alf MacLochlainn of Dublin and Galway, who got it from an old Library of Congress recording. The resulting version is a bit different from that set down by Korsen.
Songs of Edward Harrigan and David Braham
Ned Harrigan, one of the fathers of the American musical, was born in Lower East Side of New York in 1844. Third generation Irish, Harrigan teamed up with Tony Hart (Anthony Cannon) in 1871. Within a few years Harrigan and Hart had become one of the most popular comic teams in America. Building his own repertory company Harrigan wrote some 20 full-length plays and musicals, over 80 vaudeville sketches and, with his father-in-law David Braham, around 200 songs. Harrigan and Braham’s songs were very popular in the late nineteenth century and some were even recorded in the 1920s. Since then, however, they have been almost forgotten.
“The Mulligan Guards” (New York: Pond 1873) was Harrigan and Braham’s first song. Having unwisely sold it, the song became a hit. Picked up as a march by the British Army, the piece literally travelled the globe (it is mentioned in Kipling’s Kim). The song was used for one of Harrigan and Hart’s most successful vaudeville sketches in which they burlesqued the myriads of marching and drinking societies which flourished among the immigrant populations of New York City. The “march” (really the traditional jig “St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning”) which precedes the third verse was probably accompaniment for some the team’s slapstick. In the spirit of vaudeville, I have interpolated some “business” of my own at this point. The “Mulligan Guard” sketch eventually fathered a series of very popular full-length musicals which centered on the fortunes of Dan Mulligan and his wife Cordelia.
Typical of his times, Harrigan’s theater was a theater of types–ethnic types, as well as urban types. His musicals teem with stage representations of Irish, Italian, German and African-American (played by white men in black face). Instead of bemoaning the presence of this ethnic stew, it was Harrigan’s genius to accept and celebrate the new diverse America he saw growing around him. It is important to realize that he did this through a sort of rough type of comedy that might not always pass muster in our own more sensitive times. Take a listen to “McNally’s Row of Flats” (New York: Pond, 1882) from McSorley’s Inflation; with its “in-your-face” version of ethnic diversity.
One of the new urban types that Harrigan portrayed on stage was the corrupt ward politician like “Old Boss Barry” (New York: Pond, 1888) from Waddy Googan. Boss Barry was cut from the same rough fabric as Tammany chief George Washington Plunkett, who famously described himself as one who “saw his opportunities, and he took ’em.” In the song the word “Boodle” refers to graft, which offered endless opportunities to the likes of Barry and Plunkett,
While Harrigan traded heavily in the traditional elements of the Irish stereotype–drinking and fighting (almost every “Mulligan Guard” play called for a “melee” at the end)–he also was careful to emphasize the more positive elements of the Irish character. In Cordelia’s Aspirations, Dan Mulligan is forced by Cordelia to move out of Mulligan Alley in the East Side into a new brown stone flat up town. As he sadly packs up, he sings about “My Dad’s Dinner Pail” (New York: Pond, 1883), an artifact which suggests the hard work and good-hearted generosity of the Irish working class. The song also reminds us of the time when little kids “rushed the growler” in the evening for the old man. Part of my family lore was: “Up the back alley and over the fence. I got the growler, who’s got the ten cents?”
“Babies On Our Block” (New York: Pond, 1879) from The Mulligan Guards, was inspired by Harrigan’s walks through the New York streets, mobbed with Irish kids. The song suggests that within the teeming slums, an Irish-American community was being born. Note that fathers are “handy with the shovel, but also with the pen.” The Irish were not only building New York, they were running it, as well!
“Maggie Murphy’s Home,” from Reilly and the Four Hundred (1890) was one of Harrigan’s most popular songs and a great favorite with Al Smith, who was at one time “Commodore” of the New York City’s Harrigan Club. No fighting, drunken Paddy’s here. Just decent, hard working people having a good time–part of the new image of the Irish, which Harrigan was helping to create.
“Danny By My Side” (1891) from The Last of the Hogans is another lovely waltz song, but the focus this time is the Brooklyn Bridge, only some twenty years old when this song was written. The song is a good example of how Harrigan tried to set his Irish characters within the city and depict them as an integral part of it. And Harrigan’s understanding and celebration of the multi-ethnic nation American was becoming, presented satirically in “McNally’s Row of Flats,” is here simply stated: “They come from every nation, that’s o’re the ocean wide.”
Tin Pan Alley “Irish” Songs
By the 1890s, the Irish had become identified with urban America, especially New York City, thanks in part to Harrigan’s songs and shows (which toured the country during the summer months). There were scores of songs about urban, Irish-American girls, like “Sweet Rosie O’Grady.” When Charlie B. Lawlor and a friend named James W. Blake wrote “The Side Walks of New York,” it was inevitable that it would be “Down in front of Casey’s, old brown wooden stoop,” where the Irish boys and girls would gather to dance to music of the Italian organ grinder. Years after it was published, “Side Walks” became Al Smith’s campaign song when, as the first Irish-Catholic nominee, he ran for president on the Democratic ticket in 1928.
During the first decade or so of the new century, it was considered very funny to write songs that suggested romantic links between unlikely ethnic partners. There was “Arrah Wanna,” about Irish-Indian nuptials and even “Kerryanna” about a hiberno-japanico match. “I’ve Got Rings of My Fingers (Or Mumbo-Jumbo-Jijjiboo J. O’Shay)” by Weston and Barnes and Maurice Scott (New York: Harms and Francis, 1909) was very successful in this department. This song about an Irishman who is made a Nabob in India was a big hit for Blanche Ring, often billed as “The Irish Queen.” The song’s fake Hindi parallels the bits of pseudo-Gaelic that appeared Tin Pan Alley’s Irish songs.
The most common (and unlikely) couplings favored by Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and later Hollywood, were between the irish and the Jews. This theme eventually produced one hit show and film, Abie’s Irish Rose. A decade or so earlier Tin Pan Alley had churned out songs like “My Yiddisha Colleen,” “Yiddisha Luck and Irisha Love (Kelly and Rosenbaumm, That’s Mazeltoff), “Moysha Machree,” and “There’s a Little Bit of Irish in Sadie Cohen.” In most songs of this type, the Jews get the worst of the ethnic stereotyping, while the Irish come off fairly well. What these songs suggest is that by the early part of the twentieth century, the Irish had become the acceptable immigrant group, the “gate keepers” as it were, between the masses of new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and the WASPS. But the songs also suggest that the Irish were still very much in that special category of “immigrant.”Billy Jerome’s and Jean Schwartz’s song “If It Wasn’t For the Irish and the Jews” (New York: Jerome, Schwartz, 1912) was at least based on some real-life cooperation between the two groups in politics and business. A very talented and successful team, Jerome and Schwartz, had several “Irish” hits, including “My Irish Molly O.”
‘Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream” by John J. O’Brien, Al Dubin and Ronnie Cormack (New York: Witmark, 1916) will have to stand as the single representative for the great change that took place in Tin Pan Alley’s version of Ireland and the Irish. The apparently solid musical identification of the Irish with the city is dissolved after 1900. The new focus in Tin Pan Alley and on Broadway was that tinseled confection of American popular culture — The Emerald Isles. In song after song the Irish-American is depicted as awash in nostalgic longing for the lost homeland (which most American-born Irish had never seen). The singing-actor Chauncey Olcott was the key figure around whom almost a dozen shows were built between 1891 and 1920. Songs from those shows, such as “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” “Mother Machree,” “My Wild Irish Rose,” and “Too-re-loo-ra-loo-ra,” became the core of sentimental Irish-American songs in this century, too familiar to be repeated here.
With these songs the Irish completed their conquest of American popular culture (even the Yankees loved the Emerald Isles) and popular culture completed its conquest of the Irish. The Irish had succeeded in calling forth a positive stereotype of themselves to replace the centuries of negativity had dogged them in their move across the Atlantic. But now Irishness in America was embalmed within the popular culture — shamrocks, shillelaghs, green beer, the works. “‘Twas Only An Irishman’s Dream,” stands at the pinnacle of the process — a fine song which is also the reductio ad absurdum of that process — even in Cork the buildings are not painted green.