IrishMusicInfo
The Sunday Tribune Weekly Traditional Music Column by Fintan Vallely
991010
One of the heartening features of last weekend's Eddie Duffy festival at Derrygonelly, Co. Fermanagh was enthusiastic performance of 'big' old and local songs by very young singers. These are tutored by local woman Rosie Stewart, herself a remarkable performer, particularly of comic songs inherited from her father. Clichˇs and negative images often colour such 19th-century portrayals of the Irish, but many of them are sentimental song broadcast by the Popular music industry of New York's Tin Pan Alley. Stock and trade of the early recording industry, 'Shamrock' songs are known as stage-Irish because of music-hall and vaudeville theatre performance. But they are dossiers of social data, and underline that even a century and a quarter ago 'Irishness' was a marketable commodity. Sean McMahon's paperback 'A Little Bit of Heaven' (Mercier, £7.99) places seventy of them with their authors and lore of their times. Thus we learn that 'Rose of Tralee' is by Kerry man William Mulchinockin 1849, 'Killarney' is 1862, Kathleen Mavourneen 1837, 'Mush Mush Tooraliaddy' of the mid-century, 'Mursheen Durkin' from the 1849 gold rush, and 'Come to the Bower' is a USA Civil War, IRB recruiting song of the 1870s. The writers are not all Irish, for Thomas Westendorf, an Indiana doctor, wrote 'I'll take you Home again Kathleen' in 1876, and 'Come back to Erin' is from a Lincolnshire woman in 1866. 'My Irish Molly-O' and 'Sweet Rosie O'Grady' come from American Billy Jerome, and one Chauncey Olcott penned 'When Irish Eyes are Smiling' in 1913, 'Mother Machree' too. The genre persists with 'McNamara's Band' (1917), 'The Old Bog Road' (Teresa Brayton, c.1916), 'It's a Great Day' for the Irish' (1940, for a Judy Garland film); 'Danny Boy' is 1913, by an Englishman, Fred Weatherly, a copyright lawyer and author of 1500 songs. There are gems here - 'Molly Brallaghan' is a reflective testament with the cleverest of internal rhyme and a scattering of Irish words; Paddy Whack disturbs the gentry's complacency as: 'The Murphys, Burkes and Baileys / Will be there with their shillelaghs'; the popularity of a new dance is noted in 'Teaching McFadden to Waltz'. The titbits are engaging - The Boston Pilot (an Irish political newspaper that launched 'The Croppy Boy') was part-owned by songwriter John Boyle O'Reilly, and 'When Johnny Comes Marchin Home' is a Gettysburg victory song of 1863 by Patrick Gilman who organised the 1869 Boston Peace Jubilee with an orchestra of 1,000 and a chorus of 10,000. Undoubtedly the star of these writers was ex-Feakle, Co. Clare lyricist Johnny Patterson (1840-89), scribe of 'Bridget Donoghue' and the classic 'Dear Old Donegal'. The Irish material is less saccharin, its raw, vivid observation tossed off in understatement, most notably in 'Lannigan's Ball', where: 'They had to tear the paper off the wall / to make room for all the people in the hall'.
©Fintan Vallely, IrishMusicInfo.com
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