A Reel Good Time

[MUSIC – SETH SWINGLE]

JOANNE: One of the most notable and beloved aspects of Irish-American culture is the traditional music scene, and the story of how Irish music became popular in America goes hand in hand with the history of Ireland in the 19th and 20th centuries.

BRIAN: In 1845, a massive famine devastated Ireland. It lasted five years, and in its wake, the population of Ireland had been reduced by roughly 25% from deaths or emigration. Many of those who left the island came to the United States.

SCOTT SPENCER: Any group of people that are forcibly moved from somewhere, they are incredibly nostalgic about where they come from.

BRIAN: Scott Spencer is an ethnomusicologist who runs the music library at the University of Southern California.

SCOTT SPENCER: This was a group of people that had really been ripped away from a place that they loved.

BRIAN: One generation later, Irish-Americans were distant spectators to a nationalist uprising for Irish independence. Known today as the Easter Rising, it was forcibly suppressed by British troops, resulting in over 2,000 casualties. By then, one fifth of the US population claimed Irish heritage through immigration or ancestry, and a strong community was forming around the shared sense of identity, especially through music.

SCOTT SPENCER: You have hundreds of people getting together in this big nostalgic thing of people from all over Ireland, instead of just a regional area, all collecting together for this music, this dance, this social event. And there’s no microphones. So how do you get the sound across to everybody who’s dancing? Be loud.

[MUSIC – PATSY TOUHEY, “CUNNINGHAM’S FANCY REEL”]

BRIAN: Well, I’d love to drill down into some of those musicians. Tell me about this guy Patsy Touhey. What did he play?

SCOTT SPENCER: So Patsy Touhey is a really interesting character. He played a thing called the uilleann pipes, which is U-I-L-L-E-A-N-N, Irish for elbow. It’s a bellows-driven bagpipe. Instead of one that you blow into a bag, you actually use a bellows to inflate it.

What he’s doing is really loud. It’s built for dance halls. But he’s still being really incredibly flexible with the music. He’s doing a lot of really intricate runs and ornamentation. So he’s doing something that’s really traditional, but it’s also got kind of an American flair to it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: Well, another very important character in the story of Irish music at this time was a woman by the name of Ellen O’Byrne. Tell me something about her.

SCOTT SPENCER: So Ellen O’Byrne, she’s another person that’s a kind of amazing character in the recording industry here. She’s thinking outside of the box. So she’s born in County Leitrim in 1875. She moves at age 15 to New York City, and marries a Dutchman by the name of Justus DeWitt.

They open together a store in 1900– probably, I think, 1360 Third Avenue in New York City. And it’s a real estate business and a travel business. And they’re doing a lot of work with steamer ships going back to Ireland. And she’s capitalizing on the nostalgia around this.

Easter Rising is 1916. There’s a lot of big splashy headlines in New York about what’s happening back in Ireland. The Irish diaspora is really interested in what’s happening and trying to keep connected, so they keep coming into the store and asking, do you have any recordings? There were a few, there weren’t that many.

And so at one point, Ellen O’Byrne-DeWitt goes to Columbia Records and says, we really need Irish recordings. There was another company, I think Genet, that had been doing some Irish recordings, but not much traditional stuff that you could do dances with. So she goes to Colombia and she says, I’ll tell you what– I will promise that I’ll buy 500 recordings if you record Irish music for me. And they say OK.

So her son, Justus Jr., goes out to Celtic Park and looks around for– it’s a sporting event institution, and there’s usually musicians that are doing busking around the area. So he goes to find musicians, and he runs into Eddie Herbhorn on accordion and John Wheeler on banjo and asks them if they would come into the studio and record.

[MUSIC – EDWARD HERBHORN AND JAMES WHEELER, “STACK OF BARLEY”]

So we just heard “The Stack of Barley,” and if you listen in really closely, you can hear that there’s a strong downbeat. There’s kind of a backbeat that’s going on there, too. But the music itself is really based on dancing.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So if you hear them playing, they’re really going for the downbeats, and they’re trying to get a little, as they say, “lift” going on, too. A little something that will get the dancers up off the ground.

[MUSIC – JOHN MCCORMACK, “MACUSHLA”]

JOHN MCCORMACK: (SINGING) Macushla, Macushla, your sweet voice is calling. Calling me softly again and again.

SCOTT SPENCER: John McCormack, probably one of the first international recording stars in history. Caruso might have been in there as well, but McCormack really captured hearts on multiple continents. I have to do the academic scholarly stuff here.

Born in 1884 in Athlone in Ireland, the fourth of 11 children. His parents worked at the Athlone woolen mills, so he came from a pretty working class background. A pretty rural, working class background.

I believe his first recording was in 1904 on the wax cylinder. But then his cherished and beloved things were recordings from Victor from the 1910s and ’20s.

JOHN MCCORMACK: (SINGING) Fling them out in the darkness, my lost love Macushla. Let them find me and bind me–

SCOTT SPENCER: He was absolutely known for singing those real heart-tearing songs. “Macushla” is actually “my heart.” And I think a lot of people in Irish America would know “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” or “The Wearing of the Green.” And again, he really benefited from political things happening in Ireland, the end of the war, this incredible feeling of nostalgia, and also the burgeoning recording scene. And he happened to be at the right place at the right time with a really good voice.

BRIAN: Yeah, with the right voice, that’s for sure.

SCOTT SPENCER: Yeah, a beautiful set of pipes.

BRIAN: Well, to move from pipes to strings, we don’t want to leave out the fiddle players, right? Who were some of the key fiddle players, and what was their style?

SCOTT SPENCER: So here’s a really funny story. So we have all of these people that had emigrated from Ireland to the US. And in the US, it didn’t really matter if you were from County Sligo or County Mayo or from Dublin.

BRIAN: Sure. It’s all Ireland.

SCOTT SPENCER: Yeah, it’s all Ireland. Exactly. And if you’re in a foreign land, you are kind of gravitating towards other people from your homeland. It doesn’t really matter where you’re from.

BRIAN: Even if you didn’t like them before.

SCOTT SPENCER: Right. You get together in New York and you’re all Irish.

BRIAN: Exactly.

SCOTT SPENCER: So you have this really interesting situation where you have two guys that had grown up literally a stone’s throw from each other. And really, I don’t think they even knew each other. This is James Morrison and Michael Coleman. Both were from County Sligo. Morrison born in 1893, Michael Coleman in 1891.

They both moved to the US in about the same time, 1914, 1915. And James Morrison was known as the professor. Very staid, dependable, excellent musician, and he was in huge demand for faster dances up and down the east coast.

Michael Coleman was a little bit more of a rakish paddy, he was a little bit more of a rogue. And he would sometimes double book himself for gigs. He was known for not showing up, or showing up in an inebriated state. But he was just a bombastic, amazing player.

[MUSIC – MICHAEL COLEMAN, “LORD MCDONALD’S REEL”]

Again, at the right place at the right time. Shannon, Vocalion, Columbia, Okeh, New Republic, Pathe, O’Byrne-DeWitt, Victor, Brunswick, Decca. Just a really prolific recording artist. Died unfortunately quite young, but you can still hear the Sligo style in New York City to this day, mainly because of these two musicians.

BRIAN: Do the musicians themselves, are they aware of that or, you know, that just doesn’t matter to them?

SCOTT SPENCER: It’s a really interesting thing, in fact. If you go to different sessions– and you can find a session in pretty much any major city in the US, and a lot of small towns too. This is where musicians just get together and play just for the fun of it. You can go down to an Irish bar and you’ll find musicians that are there every Tuesday or every Sunday.

So buy them a pint and go ask them about this, because they’ll tell you for every single tune that they play, they’ll tell you where they learned it from, from whom they learned it, what county it comes from, what its lineage is. They know all of this stuff. And some of them don’t read music, but they have all of these stories in their heads.

They can relate it back to a particular recording, or to a particular player, or even a particular day where they learned it from somebody in Ireland, or in New York, or in Boston, or Los Angeles. It’s pretty incredible. So all of that lineage is there, and they can tell you about the particular style that they play in, the particular people that they see as influences, and even the particular recordings. A lot of the musicians will look back to these recordings and say, this is a particular style, and this is a style that I adhere to.

[MUSIC – “MISS THORNTON’S/MY LOVE IS IN AMERICA”]

BRIAN: Scott, thanks so much for joining us on BackStory today.

SCOTT SPENCER: A pleasure. It was a pleasure to be with you.

BRIAN: Scott Spencer runs the music library at the University of Southern California. He’s the author of Wheels of the World– How Recordings of Irish Traditional Music Bridged the Gap Between Homeland and Diaspora.