Will You Come To The Bower Lyrics And Chord
Trad. The sheet music is included. Recorded by just about every ballad singer including- The Dubliners-The Pogues-Johnny Mc Evoy. The video is by Luke Kelly singing. I have included the guitar chords for the youtube live version of the song which is in the key of E Major. Will you come to the bower sheet music .
[C]Will you come to the bower,Oer the[G] free boundless ocean
Where the stupendous[C] waves roll in thundering in[C]motion,
Where the mermaids are seen,and the fierce[G]tempest gathers,
To love[C]Eirn the green,the dear land of our fathers.
[Chorus]
Will you[C]come,will you,[G]will you,will you come to the[C]bower.
[2]
Will you come to the land of O'Neill and O'Donnell,
Of Lord Lucan the bold,and the immortal O'Connell,
Where Brian drove the Danes,and St.Patrick the vermon,
And whoes vallys remain,still most beautiful and charming.
[3]
You can visit Benburb and the storied Blackwater,
Where Owen Roe met Munroe and his chieftains did slaughter,
Where the lambs skip and play on the mossy all over,
From thoes golden bright views,to enchanting Rostrevor.
[4]
You can see Dublin city,and the fine groves of Blarney
The Bann,Boyne the Liffey,and the lakes of Killarney
You may ride on the tide,O're the broad majestis Shannon
You may sail round Lough Neigh,and see storied Dungannon.
[5]
You can visit New Ross gallant Wexford and Gorey,
Where the green was last seen by prout Saxon and Tory,
Where the soil is sanctified,by the blood of each true man
Where they died satisfied,thier enemies they would not run from.
[6]
Will you come and awake our lost land from its slumber
And her fetters we will break,links that long arteencumberd,
And the air will resound,with Hosanna to greet you,
On the shore will be found,gallant Irishmen to meet you.
Where the stupendous[C] waves roll in thundering in[C]motion,
Where the mermaids are seen,and the fierce[G]tempest gathers,
To love[C]Eirn the green,the dear land of our fathers.
[Chorus]
Will you[C]come,will you,[G]will you,will you come to the[C]bower.
[2]
Will you come to the land of O'Neill and O'Donnell,
Of Lord Lucan the bold,and the immortal O'Connell,
Where Brian drove the Danes,and St.Patrick the vermon,
And whoes vallys remain,still most beautiful and charming.
[3]
You can visit Benburb and the storied Blackwater,
Where Owen Roe met Munroe and his chieftains did slaughter,
Where the lambs skip and play on the mossy all over,
From thoes golden bright views,to enchanting Rostrevor.
[4]
You can see Dublin city,and the fine groves of Blarney
The Bann,Boyne the Liffey,and the lakes of Killarney
You may ride on the tide,O're the broad majestis Shannon
You may sail round Lough Neigh,and see storied Dungannon.
[5]
You can visit New Ross gallant Wexford and Gorey,
Where the green was last seen by prout Saxon and Tory,
Where the soil is sanctified,by the blood of each true man
Where they died satisfied,thier enemies they would not run from.
[6]
Will you come and awake our lost land from its slumber
And her fetters we will break,links that long arteencumberd,
And the air will resound,with Hosanna to greet you,
On the shore will be found,gallant Irishmen to meet you.
Here are the guitar chords as played by The Dubliners.
The intro. E B E
[E]Will you come to the [B]bower,Oer the free boundless [E]ocean
Where the stupendous[B] waves roll in thundering in[E]motion,
Where the mermaids are seen,and the fierce tempest gathers,
To love Eirn the green,the [B]dear land of our fathers.
[Chorus]
Will you[E]come,will you,[B]will you,will you come to the[E]bower.
The intro. E B E
[E]Will you come to the [B]bower,Oer the free boundless [E]ocean
Where the stupendous[B] waves roll in thundering in[E]motion,
Where the mermaids are seen,and the fierce tempest gathers,
To love Eirn the green,the [B]dear land of our fathers.
[Chorus]
Will you[E]come,will you,[B]will you,will you come to the[E]bower.
Below is the list of sheet music and tin whistle songs that are in my ebooks. This is the largest collection of tin whistle songs ever put together.[over 800 songs ] Including folk, pop and trad tunes plus German And French songs along with Christmas Carols.
All of the sheet music tabs have been made as easy to play as was possible.
The price of the ebooks is €7.50
All of the sheet music tabs have been made as easy to play as was possible.
The price of the ebooks is €7.50
Here's the sheet music for Come To The Bower.
If It Wasn't For The Irish And The Jews - Album By Mick Moloney
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.
In 1912 William Jerome and Jean Schwartz, one of the most
famous songwriting duas of early Tin Pan Alley, composed "If It Wasn't for the Irish and the Jews. This was at 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 common- place. 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 mu- sic 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". Nor- worth 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.
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 George M. Cohen
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
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 era of electronic mass media. He really came into his 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 "Trish' songs including "Mary's a Grand Old Name", "Harrigan" (named after his great here 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 mu- sic. 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/Irish 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 mu- sic 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 be- fore. 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 for 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 be- fore 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.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 grand- daughters 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 O", 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 im- migrants 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.
Songs from the album include-
IF IT WASN'T FOR THE IRISH AND THE JEWS
ALONG THE ROCKY ROAD TO DUBLIN
WHEN MCGUINNESS GETS A JOB 4.08
THERE'S A TYPICAL TIPPERARY OVER HERE
MOTHER MALONE
"TWAS ONLY AN IRISHMAN'S DREAM
I DIDN'T RAISE MY BOY TO BE A SOLDIER
SAILING OFF TO THE YANKEE LAND
HAS ANYBODY HERE SEEN KELLY?
FAUGH A BALLAGH
THE OLD BOG ROAD
MALONEY PUTS HIS NAME ABOVE THE DOOR
WHEN YOU COME BACK AND YOU WILL COME BACK
ARE YOU THE O'REILLY?
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.
In 1912 William Jerome and Jean Schwartz, one of the most
famous songwriting duas of early Tin Pan Alley, composed "If It Wasn't for the Irish and the Jews. This was at 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 common- place. 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 mu- sic 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". Nor- worth 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.
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 George M. Cohen
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
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 era of electronic mass media. He really came into his 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 "Trish' songs including "Mary's a Grand Old Name", "Harrigan" (named after his great here 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 mu- sic. 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/Irish 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 mu- sic 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 be- fore. 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 for 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 be- fore 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.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 grand- daughters 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 O", 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 im- migrants 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.
Songs from the album include-
IF IT WASN'T FOR THE IRISH AND THE JEWS
ALONG THE ROCKY ROAD TO DUBLIN
WHEN MCGUINNESS GETS A JOB 4.08
THERE'S A TYPICAL TIPPERARY OVER HERE
MOTHER MALONE
"TWAS ONLY AN IRISHMAN'S DREAM
I DIDN'T RAISE MY BOY TO BE A SOLDIER
SAILING OFF TO THE YANKEE LAND
HAS ANYBODY HERE SEEN KELLY?
FAUGH A BALLAGH
THE OLD BOG ROAD
MALONEY PUTS HIS NAME ABOVE THE DOOR
WHEN YOU COME BACK AND YOU WILL COME BACK
ARE YOU THE O'REILLY?
