Paper given to the British Forum for Ethnomusicology Annual Conference, University of Limerick, 1997.

© Colin Hamilton 1997

Introduction
The mass movement of people from Ireland to North America which has been going on since the sixteenth century is a remarkable occurrence on many fronts, equalling, or perhaps even exceeding, the original Diaspora in terms of numbers involved and timescale. It certainly ranks as one of the major population movements of post-mediaeval times.
The way in which culture is affected by such population movement, in particular musical aspects of culture, is the theme of this conference, and in this paper I want to examine some aspects of Irish musical culture which have been affected by Irish emigration to America, and in passing, some aspects of American music which have also been affected.

Early Emigration
The undoubted presence of individual Irish people in North America from the early period of its discovery by Europeans, and perhaps even of small groups is noted here, but it is not until the eighteenth century that the people from Ireland begin to arrive in sufficient numbers to have an effect, cultural or otherwise.
I use the term ‘people from Ireland’ advisedly in this context, for the first significant movement of large groups of people from Ireland to America involves that group known in general as the Scots-Irish, whose identity, and expressions of that identity have long been a source of contention, at least in the country they left behind.
The first Scots arrived in Ireland in the early years of the seventeenth century as part of that complex series of events known as the plantation of Ulster…and these events are complex. For example the ‘Scots’ were from only one part of Scotland, the Lowlands, and in fact were not all from Scotland. There were significant admixtures of English, and even some Welsh in the people who took over the land confiscated from the native Irish, although most commentators would agree that lowland Scots culture and language were dominant, although it is worth noting here as an aside that a notable proportion of the settlers were speakers of Scots Gaelic. Although this is not the place for an extensive examination of Scots culture, I feel it is important to establish that it differed from that of its neighbours, the English, and the Gaelic Irish and Gaelic Scots, because this difference has an important role to play in the events still to be discussed.
The degree to which this ‘Scottish diaspora’ shifted Ulster’s cultural focus away from its historical Gaelic Irish one, and the speed with which it happened, has been noted by many authors.
Beckett (1981) states:

‘Their example was soon followed by other Scots, in Antrim as well as in Down; and within a generation a great part of both counties had been transformed, in population and way of life, into a sort of extension of the Scottish lowlands.’

Throughout the 17th century the Protestant Scots planters consolidated their position in the northern counties. Their noted work ethic, and the development of the linen industry brought a prosperity to those areas which was absent elsewhere. But this was in comparison to the rest of Ireland, and in comparison with England the standard of living was still low. A rise in rents caused by the expiry of the original land leases, and religious discrimination, engendered by 1718, the beginnings of what was to be a great exodus of the group now known as the Scots-Irish to America during the eighteenth century.

Fitzpatrick (1989) reports that one of the first groups to go left that year, led by their Minister James McGregor, from Aughadowey in Co. Derry, inspired by his words:

‘Brethren, let us depart for God has appointed a new country for us to dwell in. It is called New England. Let us be free of these Pharaohs, these rackers of rents and screwers of tithes and let us go unto the land of Canaan. We are the Lord’s ain people and he shall divide the ocean before us.’

Although leaving for reasons of betterment, many emigrants of this period were far from destitute, and they travelled equipped to re-establish a farming lifestyle in America. Those who couldn’t often went as indentured servants.
By the 1770’s the rate of emigration was in the region of 12,000 a year (Beckett 1981), partly encouraged by a downturn in the linen trade. Throughout the period the numbers emigrating served as an accurate barometer of economic conditions in the province.
The Scots-Irish often found in America the same or even a greater degree of religious intolerance among the puritan Americans, than they had with the Established Church in Ireland. Initially, partly to avoid this. and partly due to the encouragement of the earlier settlers, they moved further west and south, occupying that great area of mountains and valleys generally known as Appalachia. Other ethnic groups seeking freedom of belief such as the English Quakers and several German Protestant sects made up the growing population in this frontier region, but the Scots-Irish were the dominant group culturally, and eventually politically as well.

Scots-Irish Music
The music that this group brought with them to America has been hailed as the first great injection of Irish music into the cultural melting pot that was eventually to give birth to many of the popular music forms of the twentieth century (O’Connor 1991). However the evidence points to the strong likelihood that the music that the Scots planters carried from the North of Ireland after only a few short generations there, was essentially the music and song of the Scottish lowlands. The Scots-Irish were a fiddle playing, Scots or Lallans speaking (and singing) people, and if the music they brought to America has to be labelled then that label must be Scots and not Irish, even accepting the very close relationship between them. The two peoples, the two cultures, related as they are, are distinct, and the point is further reinforced by the rich vein of songs uncovered in Appalachia by Cecil Sharp in the early years of this century, which were distinctly un-Irish in character. Any similarity between the repertoires of Ireland and Appalachia, evidenced by later collections in Ireland and America is more due to the continuing Scots/English influence in Ireland than to the export of Irish music to America in the eighteenth Century.

Early Catholic Emigration
Catholic, Gaelic Irish emigration, did of course take place in this period, but it is generally held that it was not a large enough, or concentrated enough, movement for its cultural effects to be detected alongside that of the Scots-Irish.
This mainly Protestant Scots-Irish emigration continued unabated into the first years of the nineteenth century. The pattern was changing however. An 1834 Ordinance Survey census (Fitzpatrick 1989) of 2,000 emigrants from County Londonderry, showed that 60% were Presbyterian, 30% Catholic, and 10% Church of Ireland, revealing some shift in the composition of emigration. It is thought that the increasing levels of Catholic emigration at this time had a cultural effect far less than the numbers would suggest because single males were in the majority, and they tended not to form ethnically centred communities.

Post-Famine Emigration
The massive changes brought about by the famine, still some years in the future, were to alter not only life in Ireland, but also to bring the level of emigration from Ireland to America to a previously undreamed of level.
This time, however, the vast majority of the emigrants were Catholic Irish, of Gaelic origin, if not Gaelic speakers, and it was with this group that Irish traditional music per se, first reached America in a significant way.
The decimation of the Irish rural, mainly southern and western population, by starvation, disease and emigration has been well told by various authorities and need not be repeated here. A few statistics though, dealing with the emigration that resulted will help establish a basis for what is to follow. Lyons (1971) tells us all we need to know for the purposes of this work ( the famine began in 1845).

“Thus the formidable figure for 1846, some 116,000, was easily surpassed the following year when 230,000 left for North America and Australia, apart altogether from the uncounted thousands who crossed the Irish Sea to Britain. The false dawn of the better season of 1847 reduced the flow considerably, but the renewed crop failure of 1847 at once swelled it again to a torrent, and in a few short months in the latter part of the year 200,000 left the country – a haemorrhage which was to become an annual average for the years 1849 to 1852 and to produce a total emigration of some two million for the decade 1845 to 1855.”

There are many great differences between the emigrants that now began to arrive in America from Ireland, and those that had made their way in the last century. Although the vast majority of the post famine wave were rural Irish from the poorer south and west of the country, it seems that they left behind them more than simply a physical place in which to live. It is of course very difficult to establish with any precision the social background of those who left, but it is generally accepted that those hardest hit by the famine and its aftermath of disease and eviction, the rural poor, were very much to the forefront.

Urbanization in America
In contrast to the earlier emigrants, who moved on inland from the coast, hungry for land, and epitomising in many ways the pioneer spirit in their attitude, the post-famine immigrants in general stayed in the east coast cities where they landed. One reason for this is that many simply had no resources to continue the journey, and were too ill, weak, and exhausted after the Atlantic crossing. Another may be the fact that although these were rural people, they had no real knowledge of agriculture beyond the ability to grow a potato garden, and perhaps keep a pig and a few fowl. Certainly not enough to equip them for the harsh demanding life in the frontier areas where land was available. It should also be remembered that in essence the east coast cities did not exist as centres of industrial employment in the eighteenth century.
The conditions which the Irish endured in the American cities were in many cases worse than what they had fled in Ireland. Huge slums grew up in cities like Boston and New York, where the newly arrived emigrants existed in unbelievably horrific conditions. Boston, in particular was notorious for this, in part due to certain physical restrictions of the city. In human terms, the price was paid. Woodham-Smith (1962) quotes a report which although predating the arrival of the famine refugees, indicates that conditions may well have been worse after their arrival exacerbated an already intolerable situation.

‘Lemuel Shattuck states that among Irish Catholics, between 1841 and 1845, 61.55 per cent died under the age of five; children in the Irish districts, he wrote, seem “literally born to die,” and taking the Irish Catholic population as a whole the average age of persons buried, during the same period, was 13.43 years only.’

The Irish Language in America
From the point of view of this thesis, the cultural consequences of such a traumatic change in lifestyle are of central importance. How much of the rich oral traditional culture of rural nineteenth century Ireland was brought to America, and how much survived the Boston and New York slums, or dilution in the melting pot of cultures met by the much smaller numbers who ventured beyond the cities? As in other areas of social history, little hard evidence exists and a picture must be patched together from disparate sources. One area which perhaps indicates the level of the trauma is the apparent abandonment of the Irish language.
It is hard to be certain of the proportion of Irish speakers among those who sought relief on the emigrant ships, but although English was beginning to make inroads into the largely Irish speaking west and south, it is safe to assume that the level of Irish speakers fleeing from the worst hit famine areas was high. Woodham-Smith (1962) relates that the ‘runners’ whose livelihood derived from defrauding newly arrived emigrants addressed their victims in Irish, the better to reassure (and cheat) them.
Yet no long term Irish language communities were established in America, and Irish-America seemingly became English speaking overnight, without passing through the several generations of bilingualism that characterised other ethnic groups.
The loss of a language also means the loss of songs in that language, for it has been suggested as a principle (Breathnach 1973) that songs are rarely translated in a period of linguistic shift.

The Fate of Irish Traditional Music in America
We have some idea of the music and song that was in some cases the only possession that the emigrant brought from Ireland, but what was its fate in the New World? From the point of view of the researcher, Irish traditional music essentially disappears from view, whether in the crowded streets of New York or the mountains and prairies of the interior. Even Moloney’s comprehensive study of Irish music in America ( Moloney 1992) has very little to say on the matter, and in terms of publications nineteenth century America is silent save for the ‘Songsters’, collections of song words, sometimes with music, containing a mixture of some old ballads, but mostly Irish American comic/vaudeville material.

Francis O’Neill’s writings, dating from the early years of this century, give us the first real insight into the fate of Irish music in America. His tune collections, already referred to in the last chapter, were mostly written down from the playing of musicians in Chicago, in the later years of the nineteenth century, although some were also taken from printed collections and other sources. More directly useful to the matter in hand are O’Neill’s two later works of commentary (O’Neill 1910, 1913). He paints a picture of widespread activity in the field, pipers and fiddlers playing in saloons, on ferryboats, and of his delight at the discovery of a musician or tune unknown to him.
One remarkable fact emerges from a study of these books. With a very few minor exceptions, the musicians that O’Neill gives notice to in both books are Irish born, and this is approximately four generations after the arrival of the first numbers of Irish emigrants! For example, of 54 ‘Piper’s in the Second Half of the 19th century’ three are noted as being American born…all first generation. Of 37 ‘Irish Pipers of Distinction’, again three are American born, and the 48 ‘Famous Fiddler’s ‘ fare a little better with eight being American born.
Does this imply that there were very few Irish-American born musicians, or that if there were, O’Neill was unaware of them? The second implication seems very unlikely. One gathers from the books that O’Neill, in his capacity as Chief of Police in Chicago was very well informed about the goings on, musical and otherwise, in the city, and it is simply unbelievable that if a musical scene involving second and third generation Irish musicians existed that O’Neill would not have commented on it. On the other hand the idea that at least some of the instrumental music which arrived with the post famine emigrants was not passed on to their children also begs disbelief. The fact is, however, that we have little evidence that this happened to anything other than a very minor extent, and further evidence, presented below, supports the idea that in the Irish-American communities from after the famine to c.1940, traditional music was played mainly by Irish-born new immigrants. Barry O’Neill (1973), in his introduction to the 1973 Norwood Editions reprint of Irish Minstrels and Musicians hints at some of the reasons why this should be so.

While the American Irish continued to define themselves as a community, they abandoned many of the national traits of their homeland. Only a few valued the traditional culture of language or musicianship. Facing poverty, and bigotry by the established, the community’s aim was social and financial respectability. The Irish-American press reflected these concerns. It emphasised the gaining of nationhood for Ireland and the contributions of noted Irishmen to the United States. Irish-Americans were to be regarded as full and equal citizens, was its message as it stressed those aspects in which the two countries were alike. This, however, did not include the tradition of itinerant musicianship and crossroads dancing. Search the output of Irish-American journalists authors and political leaders of O’Neill’s time for descriptions of rural life back home, and O’Neill’s work stands out almost alone, marking the strong mindedness and sense of self of its author.

These thoughts also have parallels in the behaviour of the children of the great Irish musicians who illuminate what has been called the ‘Golden Age’ of Irish music in America in the1920s. Again very few carried on the musical tradition of their parents, even those who had achieved fame via the recording boom of the 1920s.
If this evidence seems to indicate an abandonment of Irish culture by the Irish in America is there any evidence to suggest that this attitude was in itself an effect of the diaspora, or that conversely it had its origins in pre-emigration Ireland?
Some scholars would tend to think that there is some truth to the latter assertion. Callahan (1994) speaking of the identity of the Irish in America has this to say, which because of its American context is doubly relevant here:

“In addition to populations from still traditional areas in the South and West, later nineteenth century emigration involved those from transitional and already modernised counties elsewhere in Ireland. Yet the hegemony of the middle class and its version of Irish identity was so complete that all these other people – monolingual Irish speakers from the ‘rundale’ system in Mayo, displaced ‘cottiers’ from what had been the small farm region of Tipperary, and younger sons of Carlow market farmers – deferred to the cultural forms of this new middle class group in any public or institutional expression of Irish identity. It was this identity that was transferred to America.”

The entrenchment of this version of Irish identity reveals itself in the numerous American editions of Moore’s Melodies, and in the recordings of this type of song which make up a considerable part of the vocal music recorded in the 78 era. John McCormack’s recordings of Moore’s “The Last Rose of Summer” first recorded in 1910, is reputed to have sold one and a half million copies in America alone (Moloney 1982).
This brings us to the final area of evidence to which I want to bring to your attention, that of the recordings mainly issued between 1916 and 1930.
This period encapsulates the Irish recording boom, which was part of a much wider boom in ethnic recording where the music of almost all the ethnic/emigrant communities in the United States without exception, was commercially recorded. The fact that this development took place in the major east coast cities, mainly New York, where the Irish had long established communities, is of great significance, and in general it is true to say that the ethnic music recorded and released in this period is urban music. American rural ethnic, or traditional music was not initially part of this activity. Irish recordings feature strongly almost from the beginning, but examination of them reveals several surprising features, which can be summed up as follows.

1/ An early period up to 1916, where Irish material recorded is mainly what might be classified as stage Irish, vaudeville, tin pan alley, and Irish tenor. There are a very few releases { and these overwhelmingly solo} of what we would nowadays think of as traditional Irish dance music, and none of traditional song.

2/ A period roughly from 1916 to 1920 where there is an increasing amount of recording activity in general, but where traditional dance music played both solo and in ensemble becomes more prevalent.
3/The ‘Golden Age’ which essentially encompasses the 1920s, coming to an abrupt end with the Wall St. crash in 1929.

4/ A late period in the mid to late 1930s, which essentially finishes with the outbreak of the second World War.

The evidence that we have vis-à-vis these recordings and the Irish community in America I believe points strongly in the direction that consideration of O’Neill’s writings has already sent us.
The early period Stage Irish, vaudeville, tin pan alley, and Irish tenor recordings tend to be made mainly by Irish Americans, or even by people from completely non-Irish backgrounds. ( A notable exception being John McCormack) The small number of traditional recordings from the same period are contrastingly made almost entirely by Irish born emigrants…the notable exception here being J. J. Kimmel the German-American accordion player.

Stages 2 and 3 can be taken together for my purposes here and can be characterised by the almost complete absence of American born performers. There are exceptions of course, [ mostly minor players, Dan Sullivan of Shamrock Band fame being probably the most widely known ] but their scarcity only serves to reinforce the overwhelming role that emigrant musicians played in this period. In the 1930s Irish born musicians are still significant but the American born McNulty Family are dominant in terms of numbers of recordings, and show some evidence of a return to the type of material which I noted as being typical of the pre-1916 period. The fact that the levels of Irish emigration had been falling rapidly since the mid 1920s is probably important here.

Conclusions
This paper attempts to re-examine the area of the music of the Irish diaspora in America, prompted by the almost universally dismissive nature of the reaction of Irish traditional musicians to way in which this subject was covered by the book and television series ‘Bringing it all Back Home’

My main conclusions are:
1/ It is readily acknowledged that the pre and post-famine migrations involved two separate cultural groups. I would argue that the Scots -Irish were Irish only in a geographical sense. The culture that they brought with them to America was essentially lowland Scots in language, religion and music. It is this music that in the remoteness of southern Appalachia, and with strong admixtures of English and German culture, and perhaps some Irish, led to the forms of traditional music which had such a large influence on American popular music forms in the 20th century. I believe that it is at best somewhat glib, at worst inaccurate, to assign this role to Irish music, even acknowledging the close relationship between Irish and Scots music.

2/ Irish music as such arrives significantly in America with the vast post-famine emigration and the establishment of large urban Irish communities in the eastern United states. Despite [or perhaps because of] the increasing economic and political consolidation of the Irish community, the evidence we have points strongly to the fact that the continuity of traditional Irish music in Irish America, certainly up to the mid 20th century, was largely due to the continuing influx of emigrant musicians. There is little evidence to suggest that traditional music as a part of Irish culture was transmitted to second generation Irish Americans in this period.

3/ Is this to say that the post-Famine migrants had no real influence on music in America? I think we must look to the area of the early popular music forms in the United States to answer this question. Minstrelsy, variety theatre, and Vaudeville, were all strongholds of Irish American performance. I believe it is to this area and the effects which it had on later popular forms that we must look to see the effects of any post-famine Irish music that was brought back home.

References
1. Ó Snodaigh, P. (1995) Hidden Ulster: Protestants and the Irish Language, Belfast: Lagan Press.
2. Beckett, J. C. (1981) The Making of Modern Ireland 1603-1923. 2nd ed. London: Faber.
3. Fitzpatrick, R. (1989 God’s Frontiersmen: The Scots-Irish Epic. England, Wiedenfield and Nicholson.
4. O’Connor, N. (1991) Bringing it All Back Home. The Influence of Irish Music. London, BBC Books.
5. Lyons, F. S. L. (1971) Ireland Since the Famine. London, Fontana.
6. Breathnach, B. (1973) The Folkmusic and Dances of Ireland. Dublin, Talbot Press.
7. Moloney, M. (1982) Irish Ethnic Recordings and the Irish-American Imagination. In Grunow, P. Ed. Ethnic recordings in America: A Neglected Heritage. Washington D.C. Library of Congress.
_____________(1992) Irish Music in America: Continuity and Change.
PhD dissertation. University of Philadelphia.
8. O’Neill, F. (1910) Irish Folk Music: A Fascinating Hobby. Chicago, Regan Printing House.
__________ (1913) Irish Minstrels and Musicians. Chicago, Regan Printing House.
9. Callahan, J. (1994) Irish Language Communities in America. In Meagher, T.J. Ed. From Paddy to Studs: Irish-American Communities in the Turn of the century Era 1880-1920. New York, Greenwood.