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Irish-American Mick Moloney is a man of many talents: ethnomusicologist, musician, singer and recipient of the National Endowment for the Art's National Heritage fellowship among his many credits. But perhaps his greatest gift to the music world has been his work in the area of early 20th century popular song.
On IF IT WASN'T FOR THE IRISH AND THE JEWS, he sheds light on the unlikely cross-cultural collaboration between Irish and Jewish composers and lyricists around the turn of the 20th century that created some of the most popular songs of the pre-Tin Pan Alley era of songwriting and stage craft.
Musically wonderful and immensely likeable, these songs are as much of a delight today as they were when first written and presented on the New York stage.
Sleeve Notes
Irish American Songs from Vaudeville & Early Tin Alley — Mick Moloney
1912 William Jerome and Jean Schwartz, one of the most famous songwriting duos of early Tin Pan Alley, composed "If It Wasn't for the Irish and the Jews." This was a finely crafted song that had a catchy melody and clever and topical lyrics that celebrated Irish/Jewish collaborations in just about every aspect of American social and political and cultural life. Quickly recorded by the legendary Billy Murray it became an instant commercial hit.
What was not known at the time, however, was that the creation of the song itself involved an Irish/Jewish collaboration. William Jerome was actually the son of Patrick Flannery, a famine immigrant from County Mayo, but he changed his name when he saw the songwriting business switching from Irish to Jewish. Better perhaps not to be typecast in a rapidly changing entertainment scene!
In vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley's heyday between 1880 and 1920, Irish/Jewish collaborations on stage were commonplace. The term 'Tin Pan Alley' was actually invented by a Jewish songwriter and journalist named Monroe Rosenfeld who wrote several Irish songs including "I'll Paralyze the Man Who Says McGinty" — a parody of the 1890s' comic hit song "Down Went McGinty" written by Irish-American songwriter Joseph Flynn.
Tin Pan Alley was the name Rosenfeld gave in his 1892 newspaper columns to the area around 28th and Broadway where scores of music publishing houses were located as New York City became the center of the national song publishing industry. At any hour of the day one could hear the incessant tinkling of pianos as publishing houses plugged their wares to recording artists, vaudevillians and their agents. Rosenfeld likened the din to the banging of tin pans and the name stuck. Even though the music business was to move uptown northwards over time to mid-town Manhattan, the very name Tin Pan Alley was forever to be associated with the halcyon days of the music publishing industry on Lower Broadway.
The Irish/Jewish collaborations of Tin Pan Alley were attended by all sorts of interesting identity ambiguities. There was the famous Norah Bayes who had a huge hit with the Ziegfeld Follies with the song "Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?". Bayes was actually born Norah Goldberg but changed her name, one assumes, partly to appeal to the huge Irish-American urban audience of the day in variety theater and vaudeville. One of her five husbands was Jack Norworth who wrote "Shine on Harvest Moon" with Norah and also the huge hit "Take Me Out to the Ball Game". Norworth himself also wrote and sang scores of Irish songs. The noted "Jewish" star of the New York stage, Eddie Foy, was actually Edwin Fitzgerald!
Though there were doubtless tensions and competitiveness and the usual business break ups and make ups, the Irish/Jewish Tin Pan Alley collaborations represent essentially a charming story of decades of good natured ethnic flux, competition and cooperation which left a lasting imprint on the history of American popular music.
George M. Cohan
The most famous stage performer and impresario of this era was George M. Cohan (1878-1942). He was Irish-American but many people thought he was Jewish because of his name. His story culminated an absolutely amazing American success story that saw the Keohane family move as famine immigrants from destitute County Cork to center stage glory and riches on the Great White Way. George M.'s grandfather was Jeremiah Keohane from Clonakilty and his father, who was born in New England, ended up calling himself Jerry Cohan. He married fellow Irish-American Nellie Costigan and they had two children: Josephine, and George Michael who was born in Providence, Rhode Island on the third of July 1878. The whole family was artistically gifted and together they formed The Four Cohans, becoming one of the most successful song and dance acts in American vaudeville in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.
George M. literally grew up on and was educated by the American stage and there was never any question about his calling. Though the family act was hugely successful, making the almost unheard of sum of over 1000 dollars weekly in the 1890s, he branched out on his own declaring, with the swaggering self assurance that made him detested by many of his peers, that he was by far the most talented member of the family. He became a relentlessly vocal champion of a musical theater that should and would be distinctively American, a direct rejection of the inherited tastes of European (particularly British) high art.
When he burst on the New York stage in 1904 with Little Johnny Jones, the American musical would never be the same again. Not for nothing did be become known as the "Man who owned Broadway." The hits continued apace. The brash strutting figure of "Yankee Doodle Dandy", patented by Cohan essentially based on his own personality, projected a supremely confident image of young working and middle-class Americans who could hold their own with any Europeans of fancy stock. Cohan's theatrical and songwriting talents, along with his singing and extraordinary dancing abilities, captivated show business. He became America’s first genuine musical superstar, long before the CM of electronic mass media. He really came into hr. own when America joined the First World War, and songs he composed, the like of "The Grand Old Flag" (recorded by Billy Murray), "Over There," (recorded by Norah Bayes) and "When You Come Back and You Will Come Back" (recorded by John McCormack), instantly became sensational national hits. Their jingoistic exuberance mirrored the mood of a nation united as never before in a patriotic endeavor.
One could say that the first major Irish/Jewish collaboration on the American stage was between Cohan and his Jewish friend and confidante Sam Harris. They met on a trip on the Staten Island ferry in 1895 and hit it off in a big way. Cohen's talents and brash personality — allied with Harris's shrewd business acumen — forged one of the most successful partnerships in American theatrical history and ended up shaping the style of American show business for decades.
Cohan never forgot his Irish roots and several well known 'Irish' songs including "Mary's a Grand Old Name", "Harrigan" (named after his great hero Ned Harrigan), and "Nelly Kelly", featured with an irresistible waltz clog finale in one of his biggest Broadway hits.
Among the most notable Irish/Jewish collaborations was the huge hit "'Twas Only an Irishman's Dream" composed by Al Dublin and John O'Brien. Bert Fitzgibbon, Jack Drislane and Theodore Morse teamed up and wrote the entirely forgettable "When Mose With His Nose Leads the Band". In addition to "If It Wasn't for the Irish and the Jews" and "My Irish Molly O" Jerome and Schwartz wrote other huge Irish-American hits including "Mr Dooley" and "Bedelia" which sold over three million copies in sheet music. George Burns and the beloved Gracie Allen became the most famous comic duo of their era and Gallagher and Shean were the two most successful entertainers in the nation with their Jewish/lrish skits. The list goes on and on.
The Irish Contribution
These Irish/Jewish collaborations came at a time when the primacy of the Irish on the American stage was beginning to wane. Throughout the century the Irish and their descendants had been hugely influential figures in the creation of a uniquely American popular culture. Indeed the story of Irish music in 19th century America is a major part of the story of American music itself during that time.
From the early decades of the century the songs of Thomas Moore sold widely across the nation in songbooks, broadsheets and songsters. All the way to the advent of the recording industry in the 1880s and ‘90s "Paddy was King of the Boards" on the American stage. All of these theatrical and musical developments were shaped by a massive migration to America of over six million Irish people during that time.
This was an exciting era that saw American popular entertainment flourish on a national scale as never before. The Irish gravitated in droves towards minstrelsy, variety theater and vaudeville, and dominated all these uniquely American entertainment forms. Irish-American Dan Emmett was often called the father of minstrelsy. His grandfather had emigrated from County Mayo to America before the Revolutionary War and became a surgeon in Washington's Army. After the war he moved the family to Ohio where Dan Emmet was born in 1821. Dan was one of the most famous banjo players, fiddlers and songwriters of his time. His most enduring composition was "Dixie" which he wrote (or possibly plagiarized) in New York City in 1859. He then watched with astonishment as it became the anthem of the South during the American Civil War.
Stephen Foster, whose ancestors came from Foster's Glen in Derry, was the most famous songwriter in the minstrel era and when his "Old Folks At Home" sold over 100,000 copies American popular music was transformed forever. No individual song had ever sold more than 5000 copies before Foster. Joel Walker Sweeney, whose parents came from Mayo, popularized the five-string banjo on the American stage and introduced the instrument to Ireland with The Virginia Minstrels in 1843. From mid-century the most famous bandleader in America was Galwayman Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore, author of the famed Civil War song "When Johnny Comes Marching Home"
Dublin playwright, actor and impresario Dion Boucicault arrived in America just after the Civil War and single-handedly changed the course of American theater forever. He pioneered the notion of touring companies and introduced lavish sets onto the American stage. He was also a pivotal figure in the creation of American copyright law, an ironic achievement given that he plagiarized, re-wrote and copyrighted "The Wearing of the Green," one of the most famous Irish patriotic songs of all time.
The Irish-American songs of Ed Harrigan and David Braham, performed by Harrigan and his partner and Tony Hart, dominated the New York stage between 1870 and 1890. Harrigan, who was often known as "the Dickens of New York" because of the accuracy of his depiction of urban tenement living, basically invented the genre of musical theater. In the vaudeville era the compositions of Joseph Flynn and John Walter Kelly swept the nation.
Competition and Nostalgia
But by the 1880s and ‘90s huge numbers of newly arrived immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were changing the very nature of urban America. The Irish moved away in droves from their old neighborhoods and their place was taken by these new immigrants. Among them were artists and entrepreneurs of enormous talent and savvy, and they saw immediately the opportunities held out for them by a rapidly changing urban America. These new artists and entrepreneurs included the likes of Irving Berlin and Florence Ziegfeld — Jewish immigrants who made an immediate, and as it turned out, indelible imprint on American popular culture.
The music business shifted inexorably from an Irish to a Jewish enterprise. New York music publishing houses such as Witmark, Wehman, Marks and Stern, Harms and Dreyfus, Leo Feist, Snyder and Waterhouse, and Von Tilzer, owned or managrd by Jewish businessmen, dominated the American popular music scene. Theaters were run by successful Jewish businessmen such as Florence Ziegfeld, Abe Erlanger, Al Hayman, Charles Frohman, Samuel F. Nixon and Fred Zimmerman, The Schubert Brothers, Lee, Samuel and Jacob, were the most successful of all in the business. At one point they ended up owning 84 theaters in the United States! Many vaudeville houses were controlled by Jewish entrepreneurs, most notably Benjamin Keith and Edwin Albee. If artists fell into disfavor with either of these two their career opportunities were severely restricted and possibly ruined.
As music scholar Jonathan Karp astutely points out, "The Jewish-ness of the business came about neither through design nor loyalty. As a middlemen group composed of quasi-outsiders they had a unique vantage point from which to reflect upon American culture. It was a perspective that provided an avenue to many forms of assimilation."
The publishing companies hired writers by the thou sands who poured out a seemingly never ending stream of songs aimed at vaudeville and recording artists looking for vehicles to make them famous. Songwriters often worked in teams, sometimes with exclusive contracts between performers and their agents However, despite the now overwhelming predominance of Jewish entrepreneurs and performers, Tin Pan Alley continued to issue streams of songs with Irish and Irish-American themes.
The 1890s ushered in the era of commercial recordings. Few could have foreseen that Edison's pioneering 1879 invention was to revolutionize forever the way in which audiences would listen to music. Recording artists such as the great Billy Murray, Henry Burr, Ada Jones, George Harrison, Ed Meecker, Collins and Harlan, The Peerless Trio, The American Quartet, The Haydn Quartet and hundreds more were on the constant lookout for new material. Producers of sheet music churned out songs by the thousands in a frenzy of marketing.
There was an extraordinary diversity of songs written by the vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley songsmiths. There were love songs in their thousands, sentimental songs, the so-called 'coon songs'—a hangover from the minstrel era which never quite disappeared from American popular culture even decades after the end of slavery — ragtime songs, humorous and bawdy songs. There were many songs on the adjustment of immigrants or rural migrants to urban life. And there was a huge body of song on the related themes of war and patriotism. In fact, during WWI alone over 30,000 songs were written and copyrighted.
There were many songs that reflected an inter-ethnic rivalry where groups poked fun at one another. Sometimes there was a hard edge to the humor, in particular where ethnic groups were competing for jobs and political positions. In "When McGuinness Gets a Job" the Irish castigate the Italians for undercutting them in wages and the same message is sent to the Chinese in "Are You the O'Reilly?"
A great number of these songs extolled the virtues of young Irish-American women. They were published in sheet music with lavishly illustrated covers and established the image of the Irish American girl next door as the idealized American female companion and ultimately wife.
In real lower middle-class urban American life these Irish-American girls would have been the daughters or granddaughters of immigrant Irish women who had worked as domestics or in the textile mills. Their offspring had graduated to respectable jobs as nurses, schoolteachers and secretaries. As presented in the songs the Irish-American girls were beautiful, gracious, well mannered and of good character. Songs such as "Along the Rocky Road to Dublin", "Little Annie Rooney", "Sweet Rosie O'Grady", and "My Irish Molly 0", were all big commercial successes and sold prodigiously in sheet music which now, in the burgeoning years of Tin Pan Alley, was marketed to huge mass audiences on an unprecedented scale.
This general climate set the scene for a proliferation of nostalgic songs about Ireland with songwriters penning verses that looked back at a lost homeland, a place of beauty and innocence where everything was good and wholesome. Particular places in Ireland: The Lakes of Killarney, Galway Bay, Tipperary, Dublin Bay, became metaphors for this idealized corner of paradise. It was a time of change and the embrace of new opportunities and possibilities, but it was also a time of nostalgia and longing for things, places and people left behind. It was a time for exuberance as newcomers to America faced new opportunities and met people they would never have met in the homeland. But it was also a time when countless immigrants wanted to forget the horrors of persecution and hardship that drove them from their homes in search of a new life in a new place. That led to the enthusiastic embracing of a culture of imagined wholeness and happiness that the Tin Pan Alley songwriters were glad to construct.
I have tried in this album to choose songs that celebrate this joyous and creative era in American popular song from the beginning of the halcyon Tin Pan Alley years in the early 1890s to the end of vaudeville and the start of the Great Depression around 1930. The diversity of the songs is meant to reflect the breadth of American songwriting in these extraordinary times which saw the development of the recording years from its humble beginnings in 1879, the invention of radio and the continuing proliferation of sheet music sales, the hey-day of vaudeville, the birth of ragtime and early jazz, all taking place against the backdrop of the dizzyingly rapid urbanization of America as people from all over the world thronged to find new opportunities in this new land where the possibilities of advancement seemed endless.
Unfortunately the bland love songs of the late Tin Pan Alley era have created somewhat of a negative image of early American popular songwriting. Though, of course, there was pabulum galore in vaudeville and in the early Tin Pan Alley years there was much more than that. I hope that this small collection of songs will show in some modest measure the diversity and general joviality of that vastly unappreciated part of American musical history. Hopefully listeners will note how its occasional ventures into the formulaic maudlin are more than matched by the forays into gorgeous melodies, exuberant rhythms, stirring sentiments, good-natured humor and banter and a never-ending stream of creative and delightful word play.
If It Wasn't for the Irish and the Jews — Written in 1912 by William Jerome (1865-1932) and Hungarian-born Jean Schwartz (1878-1956) this was popularized by the great Billy Murray. Jerome was married to singer Maude Nugent, who is credited with writing "Sweet Rosie O'Grady" in 1896, though it is probable that Jerome wrote the song himself as a present for her during their courtship. Jerome and Schwartz also teamed up on other hit songs of the day including "My Irish Molly O" which they wrote in 1905.
Along the Rocky Road to Dublin — Written in 1915 by composer Bert Grant and lyricist Joe Young, this quickly became a vaudeville staple and was also recorded by numerous artists over the next two decades, including The American Quartet and the famed McNulty Family. Cordelia was a well known moniker in New York theatrical lore and very familiar to variety audiences having been the stage name of the wife of Dan Mulligan, the central and most affable character in the hugely popular Mulligan Guard series of Harrigan and Hart Broadway extravaganzas.
When McGuinness Gets a job — This song was very popular on the late nineteenth century vaudeville stage. It was written by vaudevillians Jim O'Neill and Jack Conroy in 1880 and originally published by a Mrs. Lieder. It was dedicated to Comptroller John Kelly — not surprising in this era of Irish dominance in Tammany. Attesting to its popularity the song was published in several American songsters and songbooks including the classic turn of the century Wehman Brothers' Six Hundred and Seventeen Irish Songs and Ballads. I first heard it sung by Sean Corcoran in the late 1960s in The Tradition Club in Slattery's Bar in Cape! Street in Dublin and was reminded of it by the wonderful Margaret Walters when I was her house guest in Sydney, Australia in 2005. The version I sing here is very close to the one she recorded on her great album Power in a Song. The lyrics express strong lush American grass roots feelings on I he competition posed by Italian seasonal migrant workers in the late 19th century.
There's a Typical Tipperary Over Here — A most jovial song abut the great success of the Irish in America mitten in 1920 by composer Abner Silber and lyricist Alex Gerber and recorded by The American and Peerless quartets. Delancey Street is located north of the notorious Five Points District of Lower East Side Manhattan where the Irish lived for decades in densely packed tenement buildings after thronging to New York during and after the Great Irish Famine.
Mother Malone — This was the signature song of the great Peter McNulty who recorded it with sister Eileen and mother Ma McNulty for Decca in 1936. Words and music are interspersed with a typical McNulty Family vaudeville segue into energetic hard shoe dancing with world champion Irish step dancer Niall O'Leary doing the terpsichorean honors in this instance.
In July 2008 I participated in the Catskills Irish Arts Festival directed by Paul Keating in the picturesque sprawling municipality of East Durham. At a Monday night singing session organized by Robbie O'Connell in Darby's Pub I was mysteriously moved to sing this song even though I had not quite learned the words and knew I was most likely going to make a mess of it — which I duly did. Later in the week I visited the small Catskills Museum just outside of East Durham and discovered to my amazement that the McNulty's had played the summer season of 1939 there in a resort named the Haypress — which later changed its name to O'Neill's and later again to Darby's — Brendan Dolan, who just finished an MA Thesis at New York University on the history of the resort, informs me that I was singing about three feet away from where Pete McNulty would have sung the song back in '39.
Billy McComiskey's mother Mae tells me this that this was one of her party pieces when she was a young girl growing up in Brooklyn.
'Twas Only an Irishman's Dream — Composed by John O'Brien and Al Dubin in 1916 this represents Tin Pan Alley songwriting at its very finest with a sublime union of finely crafted lyrics and captivating melody. The lost Irish homeland is presented through a series of dreamy ethereal images transforming the urban landscape of New York City into an idyllic Irish paradise. I took this version from the gorgeous Peerless Quartet 1917 recording with Henry Burr taking the lead tenor.
I Didn't Raise My Boy to be a Soldier — This was a hugely popular song penned by lyricist Alfred Bryan and composer Al Piantadosi in 1915 and recorded the same year by popular singer Morton Harvey at a time when anti-war sentiment ran high in the United States. Irish and German Americans were understandably highly ambivalent about whether or not the United States should enter the war and, if they did so, which side they would support. When President Wilson announced the entry of the United States into the war in April 1917 not long after the sinking of the Lusitania off the coast of Cork, American popular opinion reversed itself with astonishing rapidity. Singers rushed to record patriotic songs, an effort fueled by a veritable torrent of pro-war songwriting. The patriotic effusions included "America Here's My Boy", a direct rebuttal to this song written by Andrew B. Sterling and Arthur Lange with the chorus:
America, I raised a boy for you
America, you'll find him staunch and true
Place a gun upon his shoulder
He is ready to die or do
America, he is my only one; my hope, my pride and joy
But if I had another, he would march beside his brother
America, here's my boy
Morton Harvey was effectively blacklisted and his career ended up in ruins. Strangely enough the songwriters managed to weather the storm and they continued to turn out popular material for years to come. A subtly altered motif from Thomas Moore's "Minstrel Boy", one of the most famous songs in 19th century America, provides a musical introduction to the song. It reprises between the first and second verse.
Sailiog Off to the Yankee Land — This is the kind of song that would have been sung on the American vaudeville scene by newly arrived Irish performers. It uses a lot of stock popular culture images of emigration — the sad scenes of departure of young men and women sundered from family and community, the tearful goodbyes and waving handkerchiefs as the coach carrying the young emigrants pulled away from the local village or town; the eager curiosity about news from the homeland as the travelers lands on the American side. I got this from the singing of my friend and mentor, Frank Harte who passed away in 2006.
Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly? — Written in 1908 by C. W. Murphy and Will Letters this was originally a British music hall song, titled ",Kelly From the Isle of Man". It was adapted for American audiences by the Irish American songwriter William McKenna and in 1909 featured in the Ziegfeld Follies musical The Jolly Bachelors where it was sung and subsequently recorded by the enormously popular Norah Bayes (1880-1928). Bayes was married at the time to the debonair Jack Norworth with whom she reportedly penned the big 1908 hit "Shine on Harvest Moon". Bayes' real name was Leonora Goldberg. She was born in either Illinois or Wisconsin, depending on which biographer one reads, but changed her name in the 1890s presumably because she felt it was a liability to present herself publicly as Jewish. Norworth went on to write scores of songs including the baseball classic "Take Me Out to the Ball Game". Bayes' career was a classic story in early American feminism. She entered the world of vaudeville as a complete unknown at the age of 18 at a time when the American popular stage was still essentially an all mole profession. She ended up becoming a nationally known star in 1917 when she was the first to record George M. Cohan's classic 1st World War song "Over There". She starred on the stage and also in the world of commercial recording — one of the few artists who excelled in both milieus. Norah Bayes passed away in 1928 from complications caused by surgery for cancer.
Faugh a Ballagh — The song title means 'clear the way' in Gaelic. An earlier song with the same name was a well known rallying call for Irish troops fighting abroad for foreign armies in Europe and was also popular among Irish troops in the American Civil War. This particular song was written by Ed Rose and Abe Olman in 1917. It was recorded by Henry Burr and the Peerless Quartet and also by popular singer Blanche Ring. It celebrates Irish regimental morale on the Western Front at a time when the issue of recruiting into the British Army was an explosive and divisive issue in Ireland.
The Old Bog Road — Long a favorite of Irish tenors, this heart breaking song of separation and loneliness was written by County Westmeath native Teresa Brayton, nee Boyle, during her years in New York in the early 20th century. She was born in KiIbrook, Kilcock in County Kildare on June 29, 1868, and became a nationalist poet of some renown in Ireland during the era of the Land League before she emigrated to the USA in September 1895. She settled first in Boston but then moved to New York City where she married Richard Brayton, a French Canadian engineer. She continued to write poetry under the name Teresa Brayton and dedicated many of her poems to patriots such as Parnell, Casement and Pearse. She visited Ireland several times during her American residency and was acquainted with many of the leaders of the 1916 Rebellion. She returned to Ireland permanently in 1932 at the age of 64 and lived for eleven more years. On August 19, 1943 she died in the same room where she was born in the family home in Kilbrook. Though she was more poet than songwriter in The Old Bog Road, her best known piece of work, she uses a lot of the themes and images of exile and longing for a lost and romanticized homeland which were stock in trade among the Tin Pan Alley songwriters. The melody was written by Mrs. Madelaine King O'Farrelly, a native of County Westmeath.
Maloney Puts His Name Above the Door — Even in the 1950s and early 1960s when I was growing up in Ireland, it was a considered very negative in certain circles to be considered 'ambitious' — an attitude often associated with poor rural societies globally where success is envied and resented because there is so little to go around. Accordingly many people felt that those who prospered did so at the expense of others. This song captures in delightful, whimsical vein the ambivalence many Irish immigrants must have felt in urban America about entering into the world of individual proprietorship in a land of plenty. Fearful perhaps of being considered too big for his boots among his own kind, Maloney the saloon keeper shies away from inscribing his name over the door of his newly acquired business.
This fear of the social consequences of success lasted well beyond the late 1800s. In his 1985 memoir The Drinking Life the great New York journalist and novelist Pete Hamill describing the neighborhood in Brooklyn he grew up in the 1940s writes "This was part of the most sickening aspect of Irish-American life in those days: the assumption that if you rose above an acceptable level of mediocrity, you were guilty of the sin of pride. You were to accept your place and stay in it for the rest of your life; the true rewards would be given to you in heaven, after you were dead. There was ferocious pressure to conform, to avoid breaking out of the pack; self-denial was the supreme virtue... the Neighborhood view of the world had fierce power. Who did I think I was?"
I learned this version from the singing of the great Mike Flanagan in the classic Flanagan Brothers' 1926 recording, the only time to my knowledge that the song was ever recorded.
When You Come Back and You Will Come Back — This was one of several beautifully crafted patriotic songs written with a swaggering flourish by the great George M. Cohan in 1917 after America formally entered the 1st World War The exhilarating mix of melody and brilliant lyrics can easily make one forget that the song represents an almost frightening glossing over of the savage realities of warfare. It stands in stark contrast to the antiwar songs that immediately preceded the American involvement.
Are You the O'Reilly? — The original version of this song was written, but apparently never copyrighted, by vaudeville singer and dancer Pat Rooney in the early 1890s. It was a big success on the American stage and published in scores of popular songsters of that era. The song reflects contemporary tensions in the world of labor between the immigrant Irish and Chinese populations. It acquired another life during the 1st World War when the verses were reworked in satirical vein and aimed at soldiers who had apparently wearied of popular songs such as "It's a Long Way to Tipperary". I use a slightly altered version of the original Rooney words adding in a verse at the end from the British version which I took from the 1915 Billy Murray Edison cylinder recording.
Special thanks to all the artists who performed on the record. Thanks to Dana Lyn for her string quartet arrangements, and to Vince Giordano for his big band arrangements, unfailing good-natured support and enthusiasm. To Glenn Barrett at Morning Star Studios with whom I have worked with on every major project for close to thirty years. To Dave Schonauer of Morning Star and Will Sehillinger, owner of Pilot Studios, who recorded the tracks with Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks at Sear Studio in Manhattan. To my great friend and colleague Mike Beckerman for his invaluable help in editing these liner notes and to my friend Doris Meyer for her eagle eye with punctuation and phrasing. To the wonderful Erin O'Donnell, one of my best students ever at New York University, for her help in locating visuals often from the most obscure library and museum sources. To the fine folks at Archeophone Records who have dedicated so much time and effort to make the nation’s early musical heritage available to us all.
To Pat Grogan, Jesse Smith and Brendan Dolan for their friendship and assistance in tracking down esoterica on the life and times of the incomparable McNulty Family. To Jim Flannery, Peter Quinn, Tim Gracy, Chris Simmons, Don Meade, Dan Neely, Scott Spencer, Bill Williams, Ed Ward, Barry Stapleton, Dan Milner and Robert Snyder for their pioneering and inspirational research on Irish American music; in particular the vaudeville era and the early years of Tin Pan Alley To Aidan Connolly and all the great folks at the Irish Arts Center. To Loretta Brennan Glucksman, whose enthusiasm for the title track was influential in my conceiving this project. To John Doyle for his friendship, endless creativity and astonishing musicianship. To visionary Garry West of Compass Records, for believing in and supporting this project.
