 |
|
|
| more images |
Sleeve Notes
Most people are familiar with Tin Pan Alley, that kaleidoscopic outpouring of songwriting that crystallized in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Yet few are aware that many of the finest songs in the history of American popular music were already decades old by that time. Written in New York City from the early 1870's on, by the famed songwriting team of Ed Harrigan and David Braham, they were published in sheet music, songsters and songbooks and sung from coast to coast. Harrigan and his stage partner Tony Hart became household names performing the songs in lavish theatrical productions that were the talk of the land. These were hugely successful figures who for decades enjoyed almost impossible fame and renown and lived life on a grand scale making vast fortunes by the standards of the day.
They were the original men who owned Broadway.
Yet their story ultimately ends in conflict and tragedy and for one of the partners, destitution and madness; an epic tale that for drama and poignancy far exceeded the melodramatic plots and outcomes of the plays they starred in.
The songs were written as an integral component of stage sketches, and later full-length theatrical productions, which dominated the New York stage for over twenty years between the early 1870's and the mid-1890's. They were performed on the vaudeville and minstrel stage and in variety theaters big and small. They were sung in concert saloons and taverns and in people's homes wherever there was a piano or organ handy. The songs were beautifully constructed with Braham's gorgeous. melodies and Harrigan's finely crafted lyrics painting vivid images of the realities of daily life in urban America at a time when millions of immigrants were flocking to the land of opportunity in search of a new life. Yet today these songs, Hum authors and the remarkably talented men who performed them on the stage are largely forgotten.
This CD seeks to recapture some of the genius of these men by presenting fourteen songs composed by Harrigan and Braham in their heyday.
Ed Harrigan's story starts with his grandfather, a fisherman from County Cork. Like many other men from the Southeast of Ireland he was drawn by the lure of riches in the cod fishing trade to emigrate to the eastern Canadian province of Newfoundland in the late eighteenth century. He settled there with his wife and raised a family.
A son, William Harrigan, was born in Carbonier, Newfoundland in 1799. Indications were that he had a troubled childhood. In his early teens he followed the seafaring trade himself, becoming alienated from his family in the process. He left home lor good, shipped onboard a Yankee clipper as a cabin boy, and over the next decade, worked his way up to first mate. He renounced the Catholicism of his parents and became a Protestant. In the early 1830s he was staying at a boarding house in Norfolk, Virginia and there he met and fell in love with Ellen Rogers, the daughter of the woman who owned and ran the boarding house. Ellen had been born in Charlestown, MA in 1814, the daughter of a gunner on board the The Chesapeake, a U.S. Navy ship. He was killed in the War of 1812 and her mother moved with her daughter to Norfolk.
When her mother died Ellen married William Harrigan. They moved to New York City and settled in Lower East Side Manhattan in a heavily Irish area known as Corlear's Hook, near where the Williamsburg Bridge now stands. They had thirteen children but only four survived infancy. One of those was Edward Harrigan who was born on 26th October 1844, the year before the beginning of the Great Irish Famine.
Corlear's Hook was to become even more Irish in the next decade as it accommodated floods of Irish immigrants fleeing starvation and misery in their ravaged homeland. By 1860 over 50% of the inhabitants of the Lower East Side of Manhattan were Irish born. Ed Harrigan grew up in this teeming Irish neighborhood on the perimeter of the notorious Five Points District.
Years later looking back on his life, Harrigan stated that it was a largely unexceptional upbringing. He never talked about his religion though it's clear that he was brought up Protestant in an overwhelmingly Irish American Catholic neighborhood. He became interested in the stage through the influence of his mother who used to do song and dance routines at home taken from the minstrel shows which swept the country in the 1840s and 50s.
Harrigan took part in amateur hour, blackface performances in his mid-teens with a well-known minstrel troupe called Campbell's Minstrels but it was an occasional pursuit — little more than a hobby. By this stage he was a full time wage earner. He had been apprenticed by his father to the trade of ships caulker — making ships waterproof. By the standards of the day this was a skilled, well-paid, secure and prestigious job.
But his life was about to change dramatically. His father divorced his mother when Ed was eighteen and he didn't like his stepmother. She was a severe and very strict Methodist widow and they did not get on.
Ed hit the road, went to the South to Florida, Louisiana and Alabama and stayed there during the Civil War years though apparently never becoming involved in the war. After the war he returned to New York briefly and then headed off again. He sailed to Central America, traveled across Panama and then up the west coast and arrived in San Francisco in 1866. He found it easy to get work as a caulker in this great port town but became increasingly fascinated by the popular stage which was now flourishing in San Francisco. The city had enjoyed great prosperity and growth ever since the Gold Rush of 1849 and there were lots of theaters and places of amusement all over the city. People had money to spend and they flocked to minstrel and variety shows.
Ed Harrigan started to appear at local theaters including The Olympic and began to write songs and sketches. He left the caulking trade and took to the stage. He performed with minstrel groups and briefly toured Northern California as a solo artist before he teamed up with Alex O'Brien, a singer and comic. Alex drank too much, however, and was unreliable so that partnership did not last long.
He acquired another partner named Sam Rickey and they enjoyed some success in San Francisco and later in Chicago. They returned east and got an engagement in the Globe Theater in New York in 1870. By now Harrigan was starting to make a name as a very talented singer, banjo player and songwriter. But Sam Rickey had the same problem with the drink as O'Brien and that partnership also ended.
Off went Harrigan on the road again this time as a member of Manning's Minstrels. In Chicago he met a young man who sang and danced and they hit it off instantly. His name was Tony Cannon.
Tony was born 25th July, 1855 in Hill Street just behind St. Anne's Church in Worcester, MA. His father Anthony Cannon and his mother, Mary Sweeney, were immigrants from Clare Island, Co Mayo. Young Tony was the eldest of five children. He grew up totally wild In Worcester and appears to have been a problem child from the outset. He missed school a Iot and terrorized the neighborhood kids. He loved to sing and dance and unknown to his parents began running concerts in the basement of the family house when he was eleven. Boys were charged one cent — the girls got in for free! He nearly hanged himself accidentally in a sketch rehearsal and was rescued from near death by his father. He was shipped off at the age of twelve to a State Reformatory — The Lyman School in Westbury. Tony hated the place and before long escaped. He briefly joined a traveling circus as a cook but then left and started to make a living singing and dancing in saloons.
He moved to Providence, Rl. and joined The Arlington Minstrels where he became known as Master Antonio. He left that company for Madame Rentz's Minstrels, a group of female impersonators in blackface, and ended up in Chicago with them at the same time as Ed Harrigan.
Harrigan and Cannon hit it off immediately and teamed up. They needed a stage name. They didn't think that Cannon sounded right so Tony changed his surname to Hart and the duo became officially known as Harrigan and Hart. One of their first major engagements together was in Boston in the Howard Athenaeum in 1871, where they were hired by impresario John Stetson. They were billed as the Famed Californian Artists: Harrigan and Hart — though Tony had never been west of Chicago!
According to Harrigan biographer Richard Moody "No one could match their walkarounds, their jigs and clogs, Harrigan's trembling tenor and Hart's tender falsetto and above all their joyous and extravagant clowning."
They made a salary of 150 dollars a week each which was a fortune in those times. At the invitation of Tony Pastor, the charismatic entertainer who later was to achieve lasting fame as the man who invented vaudeville, they left Boston and took up an engagement in New York first at the Union Square Theater and later after a couple of East coast and Midwest tours at Pastor's Theater.
After a brief stint there they were hired by impresario, Josh Hart, to appear in variety shows in his Theater Comique at 541 Broadway.
Before Harrigan left Boston, John Braham, who was the leader of the orchestra at the Atheneum, had given him a letter of introduction to his Uncle, David, who was leader of the pit orchestra at the Theater Comique.
Born in England on 1st January, 1834, David Braham came from a very musical family. He came to America with his brother Joe in 1856. By this time he was an accomplished violinist and had no trouble finding employment as a musician in New York.
Harrigan and Braham decided to write songs together. Harrigan visited Braham's house frequently to work on the songwriting. But he ended up being totally distracted by a beautiful young girl in the house, Annie Braham, one of David's five daughters. He couldn't keep his eyes off her. And he kept coming back to the house even when he didn't have to. The attention was reciprocated and a life long romance was under way. Within a few years they were married — she was seventeen and he was thirty-two. Annie had ten pregnancies. Three children died in childbirth but seven survived. By all accounts Ed was a devoted husband and father for the whole of their marriage.
Harrigan and Hart settled into the Theater Comique at 541 Broadway. Before long they were the most popular artists on the bill and eventually ended up running the whole show. Originally they leased the building from Josh Hart on a show-by-show basis but then took it over themselves as a full time partnership venture.
It was around this time that Harrigan started to write thematic sketches that began as afterpieces following a night of variety. He based these on life in the mostly Irish neighborhood of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. These afterpieces, including Who Owns the Clothes Line, The Gallant 69th, The Day I Kem Over and The Day We Celebrate were a big success and he started to expand them both in length and complexity.
It was a sketch called The Mulligan Guard that was to become their first monster hit. The Mulligan Guard was a mythical Irish American target company located in the Lower East Side. Target companies were informal target shooting clubs organized in great numbers after the Civil War. They held excursions, picnics and other social outings, which often turned into drunken revelries, and they conducted an inordinate number of marches through city streets.
According to Moody, "Every loyal, patriotic, able-bodied man who loved to march, shoot, and carouse could join the Cleveland Light Guards, The Garibaldi Guards, The Lafayette Battery, Oregon Blues, First Ward Magnetizers, Mustache Fusiliers, The Washington Market Chowder Guard, The Napper Tandy Light Artillery Company, The Liberty Guards, the Gotham Guards, The Kelly Guards, The Killarney Volunteers." On one Sunday alone over 127 companies of over 12,000 men paraded up Broadway.
The Mulligan Guard sketch was satire from the outset. The largely working class audience who knew about and often were members of these target companies could relate directly to the characters and to the humor.
There were only three members of the Mulligan Guard. Them was Dan Mulligan who was a tailor in the 7th Ward and Capt. Jack Hussey who was named after a baggage master at Castle Garden whose chest was covered with medals he was awarded as a result of rescues from drowning he had performed along the East River. The third member was a young boy named Morgan Benson, an African American teenager who was barely able to carry a target that was almost as big as himself. This was the sum total of the Mulligan Guard.
Harrigan led the company as the captain, wearing a big oversized Napoleonic hat and an ill-fitting military tunic. Strapped to his belt was a huge sword that dragged along the ground. Hart was the one-man army wearing undersized clothes that were far too small with an expanse of dirty white shirt showing between his tight fitting tunic and his shrunken pants. On his head was a big moth-eaten giant shako. The song Harrigan and Braham wrote with this name captivated New York and eventually took America by storm.
The song and the sketch were so popular that Harrigan made a daring move and wrote a considerably expanded version of the sketch that he turned into a full-length play. It was an instant smash hit. A whole series of plays on the Mulligan Guard theme resulted over the next seven years and a cast of central characters expanded as the series developed.
The main character was Dan Mulligan, an immigrant from County Tipperary who served in the Irish Brigade in the American Civil War. He worked at various times as a sailor, garbage collector and saloonkeeper and eventually becomes an alderman in the Irish-dominated Tammany political network. Dan was good-natured and garrulous but at times ill tempered; he liked to have a few drinks, he was very proud to be American and equally proud to be Irish. His wife Cordelia (played by Annie Yeamans who was originally from the Isle of Man) was a practical, faithful, generally even-tempered, lifelong companion who was always looking for ways to improve the family circumstances.
Rebecca Allop (played by Tony Hart in drag) was a much married and much widowed African American neighbor who at times was Cordelia's housekeeper. She was also a bookkeeper and took bets on a variety of gambling ventures. Her consort was Captain Sam Primrose, a flamboyant African American (played by Johnny Wild) very much an urban zip coon dandy prototype. William Gray played another African American character of dubious character, Palestine Puter.
Playing a prominent part in all the Mulligan Guard productions were The Skidmore Guards, an African American target company. In the tradition of minstrelsy the members were represented by white actors in blackface often including Harrigan and Hart.
There were many Irishmen in the plays such as Walsingham McSwiney who ran The Wee Drop saloon and there were Germans like Gustav Lochmuller the local butcher with an Irish American wife. Chinese immigrant, Ah Wung, ran a laundry, flop house and opium den. In later productions Harrigan would introduce Italian and Jewish characters as those ethnic populations increased in the Lower East Side.
Harrigan and Braham wrote scores of songs for these plays and like the dances, which often accompanied them, they were woven seamlessly into the plot and action of the theatrical productions in a fashion that anticipated the birth of the modern musical.
Harrigan had a great eye for talent and assembled a brilliant and versatile cast that could play a variety of roles with ease. All were "no namers" that Harrigan discovered but they went on to achieve stardom with him. They earned good salaries and were also paid for rehearsals — a major innovation in American theater at that time. They were a happy crew and almost all stayed with Harrigan for years.
Harrigan and Hart weren't the first to depict lower class American urban life on the stage. Dublin-born John Brougham had done it in the 1860s and so had Augustine Daly. Another Dublin-born playwright, Dion Boucicault, had achieved a measure of popularity with The Poor of New York. But compared with Harrigan and Hart's productions their depictions of lower class life were generic and superficial. It was the deep social insights in Harrigan's works that set them apart from anything that had taken place up to that point on the American stage; also the extraordinary blend of theater, music and dance and comedy that was to become the cornerstone of everything they produced.
Harrigan and Hart began a series of full-length production runs. A three-month run was the norm for their shows and this kind of longevity was unprecedented in the history of American Theater.
Audiences certainly got value for money. The shows were at least three hours in length. The sets, many designed by people at the pinnacle of their profession such as David Witham, were positively sumptuous. Master machinist, Robert Cutler, introduced special sound and lighting effects, often highly dramatic, which were far more adventurous and technically advanced than in any other New York theater. There were overtures and musical bridges between scenes and acts and musical introductions to characters entering the stage and these were performed in magisterial style by David Braham and his pit orchestra with a lineup that could include up to three fiddles, viola, cello, bass, clarinet, flute, cornets, trombone, timpani and piano. In each new show there was a combination of very singeable original Harrigan and Braham songs and old favorites from previous productions. There was always great dancing and Harrigan hired the top choreographers of the day to produce the routines.
There were highly entertaining, melodramatic and often outrageous comic plots and also lots of humor and slapstick There was inter-ethnic rivalry in abundance and perhaps this acted as a catharsis for audiences experiencing the day-to-day stress of adjusting to new neighbors in unfamiliar surrounds There were wonderfully authentic costumes in fact Harrigan and Hart often traveled around Manhattan buying clothes off the backs of newly arrived immigrants.
The characters in the shows were highly realistic and accessible to the audiences and they appeared in familiar social settings. Harrigan himself said: "I didn't have to hunt up characters, I had thoroughly familiarized myself with every existing type...commingling with these characters in their everyday life.. .though I use types, I try to be as realistic as possible. Not only the costuming and accessories must be correct, but the speech and dialect, the personal 'make up' the vices and the virtues, habits and customs must all be accurate."
Urban America was seeing itself comprehensively represented on the popular stage for the first time. It was the ultimate theater of realism and critics did not miss the opportunity to compare Harrigan to Dickens, Balzac, Zola, Moliere and even Euripides.
Despite all the personal and inter-ethnic conflicts in the shows happy endings always rounded them out and everyone left the theater feeling good.
The productions were particularly attractive to Irish American audiences that saw themselves represented with uncanny accuracy. The characters were sketched with great attention to detail and Harrigan moved the image of the Irish on the American stage emphatically away from the simian depictions which had proliferated for decades in England and America.
Harrigan did retain some elements of this stage stereotype particularly the drinking and fighting. But generally his Irish characters were positively sketched. In some productions they might be vagabonds, pugilists, rogues or drunks but never bums. As a whole they were depicted as jovial, neighborly, talkative, witty, resilient, friendly, sentimental, patriotic and loyal. And every other one of them seemed to be a singer, dancer, musician or comic.
Harrigan's Irish urban neighborhood, though it was low class, was a warm supportive environment. The world represented was largely the home, saloon, places of work, places of recreation and the all-important arena of ward politics.
Religion was one very significant omission. The overwhelming majority of Irish immigrants might have been Catholics and Democrats but in Harrigan's plays there was never any mention of creed or faith and this helped set the tone for what became a very American tradition of secular popular entertainment.
It was hard to get a seat in the Theater Comique even though it held over 1,000 people. There was plenty of competition. Harrigan and Hart were operating alongside the likes of Edwin Forrest and Edwin Booth in Shakespearean productions. Buffalo Bill was often in New York City with his Wild West show. P.T. Barnum's extravagant productions were taking place nightly in his huge Hippodrome. There were performances by Tony Pastor and Bryant's Minstrels and hundreds of other troupes. Luminaries such as Bret Harte and Mark Twain gave widely publicized public lectures. In the late 1870s Gilbert and Sullivan hit town and over a decade later Victor Herbert arrived on the scene. All these were highly successful artists but none could compete in popularity with Harrigan and Hart. They were simply in a different league.
They went from success to success and in 1881 moved triumphantly uptown to their New Theater Comique at 728 Broadway, which they designed specially as a permanent home for their productions. It was described in the newspaper, Spirit of the Times, as "the first thoroughly American Theater."
There was comfortable seating for 1200 in a main floor, balcony and gallery. There were nightly shows and matinees on Tuesdays and Fridays. Admission prices ranged from 25 cents to a dollar and this was easily affordable to working class audiences. Harrigan stated that wealthy people were welcome "as long as they did not inhibit the shirt sleeve brigade."!
They took a break from the Mulligan Guard series and put on plays such as The Major, McSorley's Inflation and Squatter Sovereignty where most of the action took place in the notorious Irish shanty town in what is now Central Park. All were huge successes and had record runs. Harrigan, Hart and Braham were at the height of their powers.
But there was trouble on the horizon and it arrived in the form of a beautiful woman. Gertie Granville was an actress who was engaged by Harrigan to appear in The Major, the lust production at the New Theater Comique. Tony Hart was thoroughly smitten and after a brief romance they were married. Gertie expected to be part of the inner Harrigan company circle immediately and get the best female parts but that was not to be. Many in the company did not like her, especially the women. Annie Harrigan and Annie Yeamans were particularly wary about her motives viewing her as an ambitious gold digger who was using Tony as a career stepping-stone. Tensions mounted.
Then the unthinkable happened. On 23rd December, 1884 the New Theater Comique burned to the ground. The building was uninsured. Offers of assistance poured in with friends and colleagues offering space for their productions as they made plans for a new home. However the financial loss was crippling especially to Hart who unlike Harrigan and Braham had never earned royalties on composed work. Harrigan and Hart struggled on for a while but things went from bad to worse.
The two could hardly have been more different in their personalities. Offstage Harrigan, a man of sober, disciplined habits, spent his days writing, rehearsing, auditioning and involving himself in the business aspects of running a theater. His life was devoted to work and family. Tony Hart was most diligent about his responsibilities as a performer but when the show was over he would enjoy the recreations offered by a great city like New York. He was high spirited and impetuous and loved the bright lights. Those personality differences never divided them before but now they helped widen the growing chasm between the two old friends. Five months after the fire Hart announced that he was leaving the partnership and striking out on his own. Their fans and indeed the general public were aghast, finding it almost impossible to believe that the most famous partnership in America was ending.
Tony's career went downhill very quickly. He was unable to find material of the quality of the Harrigan productions that provided such a perfect vehicle for his great talents. He also began behaving erratically accentuating a pattern of behavior that had surfaced near the end of his relationship with Harrigan. Then the awful truth came out. Tony Hart was suffering from the advanced ravages of syphilis. Not only was that dreaded disease a death sentence at that time but most sufferers gradually lost their minds towards the end.
Tony Hart was admitted to an asylum for the insane in his native Worcester shortly after his last stage performance, Donnybrook, at the Boston Athenaeum.
Gertie too started to behave oddly and fell mortally ill. She died in March 1890. Hart came out of the asylum for the funeral and according to the Dramatic Mirror followed the coffin down the aisle of St John's Roman Catholic Church in Worcester "sobbing like a baby" every yard of the journey. He went into a major decline after Gertie's death and died in Worcester on Nov 4, 1891 three months after his thirty sixth birthday, leaving an estate of eighty cents.
His friend Nate Goodwin wrote: "That boy caused more joy and sunshine by his delightful gifts than any artist of his time. To refer to him as talented was an insult. Genius was the only word that could be applied. He sang like a nightingale, danced like a fairy and acted like a master comedian. His magnetism was compelling, his personality charming."
There was a big funeral in Worcester. Ed Harrigan did not come because he was in the middle of rehearsing for a new show. But he sent a big bouquet of flowers with a centerpiece of red roses surrounded by a border of white chrysanthemums. The roses spelled out the one word: "partner" Life went on. Ed Harrigan opened a new theater on Broadway and Herald Square and named it Harrigan's Theater, later to become known as The Garrick.
With most of the Theater Comique cast members he produced popular shows such as The O'Reagans and then the hugely successful Reilly and the 400, which unveiled the great song hit Maggie Murphy's Home.
There were other shows afterwards such as The Last of the Hogans, The Woolen Stocking and Marty Malone but Reilly and the 400 was to be Harrigan's last major success. New York was changing. Immigrants from Russia, Ukraine and Eastern and Southern Europe were replacing the Irish in the New York lower class neighborhoods. Harrigan was not familiar with the new ethnic cultures in the old neighborhoods he used to know so well and he began to lose touch with his audience. Like other entrepreneurs he was badly affected by the economic depression of the 1890s which had a severe impact on the American entertainment business.
He suffered personal tragedy when his beloved son Eddie died of peritonitis at the age of seventeen. Eddie seemed destined lor stage stardom even at such a young age and Harrigan was devastated by his death. He closed the theater for the summer and went on his first trip ever to Europe. He went to London and from there to Ireland where he met members of his ancestral family, He brought back a tweed suit with extra large pockets where he could place the notes on new sketches he was working on.
However his stage productions became fewer and fewer. He began to spend more and more time with Annie and Ills children. He still did stage performances but mostly in other peoples' productions. He even contracted some of his own earlier works into short vaudeville sketches. His career was now ironically turning full circle. His last engagement was in 1909, blacked up as a minstrel in a Lambs Society production, He collapsed during a rehearsal, probably of a mild heart attack or stroke, and never appeared on stage again after that.
David Braham had passed away four years earlier and, with his halcyon years now well behind him, Harrigan, convinced that he was a forgotten man, grew increasingly melancholic and reclusive.
One of his greatest admirers was George M. Cohan, who two years before had written a song in his praise of his hero as part of his musical "Fifty Miles From Boston" He named the song 'Harrigan." The last verse goes: Where is the man never stood for a gadabout Harrigan that's me Who is the man that the town's nearly mad about Harrigan that's me The ladies and babies are fond of me I'm fond of them too in return you see Who is the gent that deserves his own monument Harrigan that's me
Ed Harrigan himself attended the show a few weeks after it opened and sat in the front of the theater with tears in his eyes as he was applauded by the audience.
In later years George M. Cohan was to say: "Edward Harrigan was a fine artist, a great writer of human comedies and one of the grandest men it has ever been my pleasure to meet.. .Harrigan inspired me when I applauded him from a gallery seat. Harrigan encouraged me when I met him in after years and told him of my ambitions. I live in hopes that some day my name may mean half as much to the coming generation of American playwrights as Harrigan's name has made to me."
On 6th June, 1911 Ed Harrigan passed away peacefully at home in New York surrounded by Annie and his whole family. He was sixty-six. In his New York Times obituary Harrigan was described as "a man of kindly nature, well informed and thrifty and he will be remembered as one who served his era well and helped to lighten the cares of life. His death has ended an epoch, an era of good fellowship.. .There was never a better man living than Ned Harrigan."
Today, apart from the Cohan song, the name of Ed Harrigan is forgotten. We are the poorer for our failure to remember and acknowledge the legacy of this most genial and remarkable man, his cohorts David Braham and Tony Hart, and all the other great actors and performers in his company. The collaborative genius of Harrigan, Hart and Braham affords us a unique window not just into the evolution of Irish America but into America itself; not just its times of turbulent conflict but also the process of resolution which made day to day life possible in the teeming cities of this grand new world.
Harrigan has been compared with Dickens but he might also be compared with Chaucer, recognizing the foibles and eccentricities of his fellow travelers in life but rarely becoming judgmental. Ed Harrigan's theater always promoted the kind of accommodation that is the essence of true tolerance in any multicultural society. The characters in his plays quarreled incessantly and often fought physically but ultimately they learned to live together — which of course is what the world should be all about!
Mick Moloney — New York, December 2, 2005
The following publications provide further information on the work and lives of Harrigan, Braham and Hart:
Finson, Jon W. 1997. Edward Harrigan and David Braham. Collected Songs 1873-1882 (Madison. American Musicological Society: Recent Researches in American Music, Vol. 26)
Finson, Jon W. 1997. Edward Harrigan and David Braham. Collected Songs 1883-1896 (Madison. American Musicological Society Recent Researches in American Music, Vol. 27)
Franceschina, John. 2002. David Braham: The American Offenbach. (New York, London. Routledge)
Kahn, E.J. Jnr. 1955. The Merry Partners: The Age and Stage of Harrigan and Hart. (New York. Random House).
Moody, Richard. 1980. Ned Harrigan. From Corlears Hook to Herald Square (New York, Chicago. Nelson Hall)
Preston, Katherine K. Ed. 1994. Irish American Theatre: The Mulligan Guard Ball and Reilly and the Four Hundred. (New York and London. Garland Publishing).
Simmons, Chris: 2002. "The Mulligan Guards: Sung Everywhere With the Greatest Success." Vaudeville Times: Vol V. Issue 4. Winter 2002-2004
Notes on the Songs
McNally's Row of Flats (1882) — Written for the play McSorley's Inflation this shows Harrigan at his best as a wordsmith painting most evocative pictures of life in the teeming tenement housing of Lower East Side Manhattan at a time when Irish post-famine immigrants and their descendants are living side by side with their African American neighbors and newly arrived Asian and European immigrants. Harrigan and Braham used dance tunes as breaks in many of their songs and it felt highly appropriate to add a lively Kerry polka to the verses.
Are You There Moriarity? (1876) — There is hardly an Irish person over the age of fifty who has not heard this song in childhood performed on radio or television by Jimmy O'Dea one of Ireland's best loved mid-20th century popular stage performers. O'Dea was a staple figure in music hall, pantomime and variety theater and with his sidekick, Maureen Potter, toured the length and breadth of Ireland for decades before television came to the country in 1961. Are You There Moriarity was his signature song. He changed the words a bit — the phrase 'A Metropolitan MP' became 'I belong to the DMP' (Dublin Metropolitan Police) — but used the same basic melody as the original Moriarity written by Harrigan and Braham in 1876. By this time the Irish American policeman had become a familiar figure in urban America. Often the first task of the newly appointed copper was to confront the leader of the local Irish American street gang in public and show him who was boss. Harrigan keeps it light in these lyrics though and presents Moriarity as the genial local cop on the beat beloved by all, especially the ladies.
The Regular Army O (1874) — Harrigan never missed a chance to poke fun at sacrosanct, social institutions and The Regular Army O which appeared in a sketch with the same title was a huge hit especially among recently arrived immigrants who were not yet American citizens and therefore ineligible to join the official militias. As with all effective send-ups there were objections launched from high places (anticipating by almost one hundred years later the reactions of top army brass to the popularity of the noted television show Sergeant Bilko) and this of course only encouraged the popularity of the song. The cover of the accompanying songster highlighted the comic routines with the hilarious body postures of Harrigan, Hart and other members of the Theater Comique ensemble. The jig in the middle and at the end of the song was composed by John Doyle and Ivan Goff.
Patrick's Day Parade (1874) — March 17th is now of course one of the biggest ethnic festive occasions in the American calendar. Ironically the day was first marked institutionally by predominantly Protestant Irish officers serving in the British Army in America in the colonial era. Decked out in British military regalia they would toast the shamrock of their native Ireland. After the Civil War the celebration was appropriated comprehensively by Irish American Catholic organizations like the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The central element became the parade through city streets, a symbolic marking of turf that mirrored the meteoric rise of the Irish in American urban politics. The celebration evolved during Harrigan's youth and he knew first hand how important it was to the Irish in their new home. One of the earliest Harrigan-Braham collaborations, this song first appeared in 1874 in a sketch called The Day We Celebrate.
My Dad's Dinner Pail (1883) — As the Mulligan Guard series evolved, the plots developed around many of the social issues confronting urban ethnic America. Dan Mulligan was happy with his working class neighborhood on the Lower East Side. He drank in the local saloon run by Walsingham McSweeny and socialized with a colorful, ethnically diverse coterie of friends in the neighborhood. But his wife Cordelia had higher aspirations. Like many other urban working class Irish American women of the day she wanted to move uptown to a more middle class life. When she made some money from real estate she did not miss the chance to improve the family circumstances. Dan was dragged most reluctantly out of the Lower East Side to Midtown Manhattan. The drama that follows takes up much of the plot material and character development in The Mulligan Guards' Surprise (1880), Cordelia's Aspirations (1883) and Dan Tribulations (1884). Signifying a clear break with the past, Cordelia left behind most of their furniture and worldly possessions but Dan insisted on bringing with him his father's dinner pail, a humble artifact which connected Dan symbolically to the working class world he was leaving behind. He found life uptown intolerable and audiences were amused by his antics trying in vain to adjust to an unfamiliar way of life.
Get Up Jack John Sit Down (1885) — Harrigan's deep familiarity with seafaring life resonates in the evocative images conjured up in the play Old Lavender. The beautifully constructed lyrics are complemented perfectly by Braham's gorgeous melody. It has the feel of a traditional sea song and was actually collected by folk song scholar Frank Warner in the mid twentieth century from oral tradition. A version of it is now sung widely in New England under the title Jolly Roving Tar with most of the original Harrigan lyrics and a chorus that goes:
Come along, come along me jolly brave boys
There's lots of grog in the jar
We'll plow the briny ocean
With a jolly roving tar
Danny By My Side (1892) — The Brooklyn Bridge, which opened in 1885 after thirteen years of construction, was one of the wonders of the late nineteenth century world. Designed by John Roebling and his son Washington, this magnificent suspension bridge was a testament not only to the greatness of New York City but also to American ingenuity and creativity. Apart from its obvious utility in linking Brooklyn with Manhattan, it was one of the most extraordinarily beautiful sights in urban America and people came from near and far to gaze on and walk across the fabulous structure. Ed Harrigan was not going to miss the opportunity to pen one of the first songs celebrating this extraordinary milestone in the history of his native New York. Written in 1892 Danny By My Side appears in The Last of the Hogans which immediately followed Reilly and the 400 at Harrigan's Theater on Herald Square.
Never Take the Horseshoe from the Door (1880) — After the Mulligans move uptown they are inundated by freeloading relations from Ireland, most notoriously Cordelia's brother, the dastardly Planxty McFudd, who is determined to relieve his sister of her new found wealth by various acts of skullduggery. These include forging a note from a fictitious lover of Dan which Cordelia is destined to discover. Poor Dan recites these lines on his way uptown giving his opinion on the general situation.
I Never Drink Behind the Bar (1883) — McSorley's Irish Ale House on East 7th St in East Greenwich Village is the oldest and one of the most famous bars in New York City. It was founded in 1855 by Tyrone immigrant, John McSorley, and has stayed open since then, even during Prohibition, clearly demonstrating very positive political connections! Behind the famous pot bellied stove on the left hand side of the bar as one enters from 7th Street is a poster from Harrigan's play McSorley's Inflation that contains the names of several songs from the play including McNally's Row of Flats and I Never Drink Behind the Bar. The bar was a favorite haunt of Harrigan's and John McSorley was delighted when Harrigan took a break from the Mulligan Guard series to dramatize the fortunes of the upwardly mobile McSorleys, making his central character an ambitious Irish American saloon keeper who runs for the prestigious city political office of Coroner.
The Babies on Our Block (1879) — This appears in one of Harrigan's most critically acclaimed plays The Mulligan Guard's Ball where the high point is a major melee and knockabout at the end between the Mulligan and Skidmore Guard. They both end up renting the same hall (The Harp and Shamrock) on the same night and agree that the Skidmore Guard will take the second floor upstairs space while the Mulligan Guard will occupy the ground floor. The ceiling collapses in the middle of the revelry and the brawl begins.
This song is one of Harrigan's most evocative portraits of the neighborliness of Lower Manhattan tenement life. In urban America Irish immigrants were able to recreate many aspects of the social and cultural life they enjoyed in the densely crowded villages of pre-famine Ireland. Harrigan's deep knowledge of immigrant song traditions is demonstrated by his subtle interspersing in the verses of song titles such as Little Sally Waters and Green Gravel a well-known British and Irish children's song of the day.
The Mulligan Guards (1873) — This was the signature tune of the Mulligan Guard series and Harrigan would introduce it time and again into various productions decades after he and Braham wrote the original. It was by far their most popular song and ironically the only one that they signed away outright for a pittance. It spread through sheet music and songsters across the United States and beyond. The catchy melody was adopted as a standard in the repertoire of the US brass bands of the day including Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore's Band and John Philip Sousa's Band-the two most popular ensembles of late nineteenth century America. It was also played further afield by military bands such as The Coldstream Guards in England. It is even featured in Kipling's novel "KIM" where it is performed by a British regimental band in India. Little did that grand supporter of all things British and imperial know that it was a satire on the military and written by an Irish American at that!
Old Boss Barry (1888) — By the time Ed Harrigan wrote this song in 1888 for his full-length theatrical production Waddy Grogan, the figure of the Irish ward boss had become a stock figure in American urban politics. He was usually an Alderman, the single most crucial grassroots figure in the Tammany network. He provided food, clothing, housing, medicine, domestic guidance and help with naturalization. He was on hand for weddings, christenings and wakes. He controlled city jobs. He attended every christening, wake and major social event in the community. He knew everybody and everybody knew him. He had an intimate knowledge of the lives and concerns of his constituents and presided through a complex system of reciprocal favors and obligations over a world of patronage which he ruled often through fear and intimidation. This figure was also a staple in Irish American popular song in vaudeville and popular theater. Harrigan had drawn on this image as early as 1874 when he wrote one of his all-time favorites Muldoon the Solid Man for the sketch Who Owns the Clothes Line.
Such an Education Has My Mary Ann (1878) — Also known as Sweet Mary Ann the lyrics of this song shows Harrigan again finely attuned to the grassroots realities of Irish American urban ethnic life. The immigrant Irish women who arrived in America after the Great Famine had very limited employment opportunities. Most either served as domestics or toiled in textile mills in towns and cities all over the East Coast and Midwest. They sent money back to Ireland to assist their families and these remittances helped fund the passage for their brothers and sisters when they too emigrated. They tended to marry later than women in other immigrant cultures and took enormous pride in the achievements of their children. Their daughters ended up as secretaries, nurses and schoolteachers in private and public schools all over the nation. These strong, highly independent women became the backbone of Irish American communities now enjoying a measure of prosperity in their new home that would have seemed unimaginable in the famine years. The last verse shows how knowledgeable Harrigan was about the stage and social dancing of the day-not surprising as he was a nimble stepper himself and frequently had famous Irish step dancers such as Kitty O'Neill perform with his ensemble in the old Theater Comique.
Maggie Murphy's Home (1892) — This song appeared in Reilly and the 400 which dramatizes themes of upward mobility in American urban ethnic life. Willy Reilly is a pawnbroker on the Lower East Side whose son is a lawyer engaged to be married to a young high society woman. Willy Reilly wants to conceal his occupation and masquerades as a baronet. A dastardly German threatens to reveal his true identity and scupper the upcoming marriage. All sorts of hilarity ensue as the drama plays out amid scenes of upper and lower class Manhattan neighborhoods. It has of course the usual Harrigan happy ending. The upper class New York milieu is suggested by the use of the term 'the 400.' This was coined by noted writer and social commentator of the day, Ward McAllister, in his book, Society as I Found It, to denote the number of well-heeled swells that could fit into the Delmonico Ballroom.
Emma Pollock, a fifteen-year-old actress from the Lower East Side, plays Maggie Murphy. She appears on stage surrounded by firemen, coachmen, chippies, seafaring men, vagrants and fallen women. She dances an Irish jig and breaks into this song which becomes one of the biggest American hits of the early 1890s. The image of the organ in the parlor deftly denotes the genteel respectability sought by many lower class families. That Maggie Murphy's mother was a single parent is again evidence of how well Harrigan knew his Irish American community. The life expectancy of post-famine Irish male immigrants was dramatically lower than their female counterparts. Brutally hard working conditions in occupations such as mining, tunneling, Canal and railroad construction and general laboring combined with rampant alcoholism decimated the male Irish American population and created a whole generation of young widows bringing up their children alone.
Personal Note
This project began to evolve in 2001 when I moved from Philadelphia to Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan after taking up a teaching position at New York University. By that time, I was familiar in a general sense with the song writing skills of Ed Harrigan and David Braham and had recorded two of their songs: Muldoon the Solid Man (Uncommon Bonds: GL 2053) and Far From the Shamrock Shore (Crown/Random House Publications 2002), The Long Journey Home (1998 Unisphere/BMG 09026) and The Mulligan Guard (Far From the Shamrock Shore Crown/Random House Publications and Shanachie SH 78050,2002). As I discovered more and more of the Harrigan-Braham songs and realized that they had been written within a few blocks of my new home I developed a growing fascination with their lives and times. I rambled the streets they lived in and lingered at the places where the songs were sung. The theaters, destroyed by fire or victims of the wrecking ball, had long vanished from Manhattan but somehow I fancied that the ghosts of the past still remained nearby and that if I listened long and hard enough I could establish some measure of understanding of their forgotten world.
Like the theaters, the songs had almost all disappeared into oblivion. I had heard a few Harrigan-Braham compositions on recordings or in oral tradition in Ireland including The Rare Old Mountain Dew, My Beauty of Limerick and Moriarity a famous song on the Dublin music hall scene when I was growing up. The late Dublin singer Frank Harte had sung Muldoon the Solid Man for me back in the early 1980s neither of us knowing at the time that it was a Harrigan composition. I sought out those few enthusiasts who were familiar with Harrigan and Braham. I enjoyed chats with Don Meade and Dan Milner both of whom knew a couple of their songs. Popular culture specialist, Bill Williams, had included a few Harrigan songs in a privately issued cassette recording of his that I came across. Harrigan expert Chris Simmons came to my NYU popular culture class and sang I Never Drink Behind the Bar and he came again to NYU in October 2003 with Philadelphia singer, Murray Callahan, and pianist, Sandy Graham, and put on a memorable program of selected Harrigan songs as part of West Along the Road, the 10th Anniversary celebration of the founding of Glucksman Ireland House. I was now well and truly hooked.
I was to discover that Harrigan and his musical collaborator David Braham had written over two hundred songs and almost all were new to me. I ended up selecting about twenty that had a strong Irish American connection and started to learn them one by one mostly from original sheet music that I acquired at auctions and from versions of the originals collated by Jon W. Finson in his pioneering Music of the United States of America: Edward Harrigan and David Braham. Collected Songs. Vol 1 and II. (1997. Madison. American Musicological Society).
This whole process was a new departure for me as I had been used to learning songs and tunes from singers and musicians in the living oral tradition all my life. Like many traditional singers and musicians I picked up some of my repertoire in my musical journey from various folk song collections and also from songsters and broadsides. But these songs had the feel of the oral tradition about them and even when unfamiliar a style of singing seemed to readily suggest itself. And many were printed without staff notation to be sung to familiar tunes that I already knew.
The Harrigan-Braham songs were different. They had been written for the stage and the melodies had twists and turns to them that clearly belonged to popular rather than oral and aural styles. Yet in a strange way many of the lyrics seemed to be from oral tradition because many of the speech patterns in the songs were of the colloquial variety using many expressions and regional accents that Harrigan had picked up from Irish immigrants in urban America. The more I delved into the songs and started lo sing them it was clear to me that what Harrigan and Braham had produced was a unique synthesis of oral and literate, formal and informal, popular and traditional.
I started to become comfortable with some of the songs but was still not sure if this would not be just a personal idiosyncratic obsession that might at best appeal to just a few Harrigan enthusiasts. The only way to find out was to start including the songs in public performances before general audiences and I did so with fiddlers Dana Lyn and Athena O'Lochlainn. As hesitant and inadequate as some of my performances of this new material were, the visceral audience response was immediate; an instant sense of 'ownership' of these songs. It made perfect sense because the songs were grounded not only in the story of Irish America but indeed in the story of urban America in general; an epic tale of immigrants and their adaptation not only from an old land to a new land but also from a rural to an urban way of life where people who would never have met in the old world were now neighbors in the most densely crowded and colorful circumstances imaginable. Now after thirty-two years in America I realized that my own life was becoming part of a contemporary extension of that same story. I started to love the Harrigan-Braham songs in the same way that I love traditional Irish music.
I got together with my musical colleagues and we worked out arrangements for each song using the instruments that are played in traditional Irish music today. But it seemed there was something missing.
I felt that the recording needed some flavor of the old pit orchestras that accompanied the Harrigan-Braham songs in the old and new Theater Comique plays and sketches. So I visited Vince Giordano who worked at the time at the Sony-BMG Entertainment Company. Vince, a musician and bandleader of legendary proportions, is an authority on early American band music. We talked about having him and his famed orchestra, The Nighthawks, involved in some of the songs. Vince found the project intriguing and directed me to his percussionist and tenor banjo player, John Gill. Using original sheet music and copies of the 1917 Victor Mixed Chorus recordings of excerpts from Harrigan and Braham songs as pathways into the Harrigan era, John came up with arrangements tor five songs which we ended up recording in a memorable session at Pilot Recording Studios on West 24th St.
I sing the songs basically as they were written. I took the liberty of making very slight changes to some of the lyrics. Occasionally, I found myself changing some phrases unconsciously, which is of course part of the process through which all songs in living traditions change over time. Where a song seemed too long I omitted a verse (for example I leave one out in The Regular Army O and also in Danny By My Side and Maggie Murphy's Home). In other cases (such as in McNally's Row of Flats) I made changes because I did not want to retain the use of ethnic or racial terms that would be offensive to today's audience. In Harrigan's time it was acceptable for Whites to use the term "nigger" or "naygur” on the popular stage when referring to African Americans. And of course Harrigan's first performing career was in minstrelsy where such language was common. Whatever his personal opinions on race, culture and society, Harrigan was a man very sensitive to social norms and I have no doubt whatever that were he alive today he would not use or condone such language in public performance.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Jane Anderson, Murray Callahan, Marion Casey, Paul Charosh, Bob Donnelly, Terry Gallagher, Herschel Freeman, Sandy Graham, Nancy Groce, Joe Lee, Ann Morrison-Spinney, Frank McCourt, Malachy McCourt, Don Meade, Kerby Miller, Dan and Bonnie Milner, Jim Murphy, John Murphy, Dan Neely, Rich Nevins, Breandan O'Croinin, Bob Scally, Scott Spencer, Micheal O'Suilleabhain, Leni Sloan, Barry Stapleton, Betsy Trauger, Jane Walrath, Ed Ward, Bill Williams and the late Frank Harte; Special thanks to Mike Beckerman and Doris Meyer for invaluable commentary and suggestions on early drafts of these liner notes. As in all matters regarding American song and Irish American history I am more indebted that I can ever express to my mentors the late Kenny Goldstein and Dennis Clark. Thanks to Chris Simmons whose knowledge and appreciation of the work of Harrigan, Hart and Braham is peerless. His extraordinary generosity at every stage of this project was most appreciated. To Seamus Connolly, Rob Savage and all the other fine folks in the Irish Studies Program at Boston College and also to Bob O'Neill of the Burns Library there for inviting me to be the Burns Scholar in the Fall of 2004. In the process of detailed preparation for the Burns Lecture I gave on Harrigan, Hart and Braham I crossed over the crucial threshold between admirer and performer of their songs.
I have had the pleasure of meeting Ed Harrigan and David Braham's great grandchildren Philip and Elizabeth Harrigan Sheedy. Whatever their opinions on my interpretations of these songs, I hope they will regard kindly my enthusiasm for the legacy of their illustrious forbears.
Thanks to everyone who played and sang with me on this recording; Athena, Beverley, Billy, Brendan, Dana, Ivan, John Roberts, Rob, Robbie and Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks whose exhilarating music energizes central Manhattan every Monday and Tuesday nights at Charley O's on 48th and Broadway; To Nighthawks drummer, John Gill, for the band arrangements. A most special thanks to John Doyle whose boundless musical talents, creativity and high-spirited energy infuse this album from start to finish: To Glenn Barratt for his friendship and collegiality over the past two decades and for the irrepressible dedication he brings to his craft; also to Dave Schonauer for his work on so many long sessions and to Lizanne Knott for her always upbeat support. Finally great thanks to Garry West of Compass Records for believing in this project.
