Green Linnet

“Of everything I’ve done, this album was the most immensely challenging, artistically speaking,” admits musician, singer, and folklorist Mick Moloney. “It’s also the most rewarding endeavor I’ve ever been a part of.”

Moloney’s new album, McNally’s Row of Flats, pulls back the curtain on a forgotten era of Irish-American history and song. It centers on the work of actor/writer Ed Harrigan and musician David Braham, who were the toast of the Great White Way in an era when the intersection of minstrelsy and vaudeville were poised to give birth to what we now know as American Musical Theatre. Harrigan and his performing partner Tony Hart both began their careers in the minstrelsy circuit before collaborating on a series of satirical sketches based on the immigrant communities of New York City. In the 1870s, Harrigan parlayed their most popular sketches into a series of incredibly successful musical plays, for which he and pit-orchestra leader Braham wrote the songs Moloney revisits on McNally’s Row of Flats.

Their compositions are remarkable vignettes of urban life at the turn of the century, vividly portraying the condition and culture of the times with proportional amounts of humor, hope, and grit. “Theirs is an amazing story,” Moloney explains. “Harrigan, Hart, and Braham were incredibly famous and successful, but they have been almost entirely forgotten.”

Equally qualified as a musician and anthropologist, Mick Moloney brings to these songs the perfect balance of historical insight and musical relevance. Born in Ireland, Moloney came to America in 1973 and pursued a career that uniquely combines the roles of musician, folklorist, author, presenter, radio and television personality, and educator. He holds a Ph.D. in folklore, and teaches at New York University in their Irish Studies program. Moloney has participated in over forty albums of traditional Irish music and has acted as an advisor for innumerable tours, concerts, festivals, television shows, radio programs, and films. In 1999 he was awarded the highest official honor the U.S. government bestows, the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Award.

Today he resides in the city that Harrigan and Braham so compellingly documented. “Living here in the New York City, in the Village,” he explains, “I feel the same connection to these songs that I feel, as an Irishman, to traditional Irish songs.” Curiously, his introduction to their music was not through the theatre or through sheet music, but through fellow traditional Irish vocalists. “These songs were so popular in their day that they had actually passed over the sea and entered the oral tradition in Ireland. I found out their source through the enormous collection of Irish-American songbooks of Professor Kenny Goldstein, the man who brought me to America initially. Then, when I’d hear the songs being sung by a traditional singer, I’d ask if they knew that that song was written by Ed Harrigan. From the answers I got, I learned that these were major players – they had written a great quantity of quality songs – which people were almost entirely unaware of.”

While not traditional songs, the music of Harrigan and Braham is folk music in the most literal sense – music very much of the people, born of Ed Harrigan’s gift for observing and capturing the characters and situations surrounding him in the ethnic ghettos of New York. Musically they share a warm, lilting quality with Irish traditional music, while lyrically they are witty yet moving, undercutting the longing for a faraway homeland with the inspiring potential of the new world. “To find the songs for this record,” Moloney says, “I went through all their Irish-American songs, with an eye towards a thematic link between them. Material was not a problem – there is a whole other CD of excellent Harrigan songs waiting if I chose to continue.”

Once the songs were selected, Moloney had the difficult task of bringing them to life. Many of them had not been performed in over a century, and no recordings exist. The original orchestral arrangements were destroyed in a fire in 1884. Moloney turned to a pair of gifted collaborators: Irish guitarist, producer, and songwriter John Doyle and bandleader and tuba-player Vince Giordano, who specializes in early jazz. Coming from a tradition in which songs were learned by listening and passing them down, starting from scratch was not something Moloney was accustomed to. “We had to feel our own way,” he explains. “Vince, John, and I had to guess at what the arrangements were like. While I did research into the styles of the time, we didn’t want to slavishly recreate this music. That’s for re-enactors. We just wanted to capture the feeling – the spirit. It may sound odd, but the songs eventually told us how they should be sung and performed.”

“When I first began performing these songs,” Moloney continues, “I never felt more insecure in my life. I was shaky when the brass band came in and played behind me. But that insecurity disappears when you arrive at an arrangement that feels right. This album is more heart than head. Thankfully I had John there. He could listen with fresh ears – without the story and history to influence him – and see if it worked on its own. Because though the history behind Harrigan, Hart, and Braham is astonishing, the performances would be worthless if the songs didn’t cut it. But they do – they hold up remarkably well.”

The quality of the material on McNally’s Row of Flats makes the songs’ relative obscurity even more fascinating. “I can’t believe how comprehensively they were forgotten,” Moloney says. “I think it was bad timing – it was just before recording. When the recording era did come in, younger singers didn’t want to perform these songs – they were their parents’ songs. Harrigan, Hart, and Braham were too late for mass media, but too early for people to be nostalgic for.