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Mick Moloney in Jewish Herald Voice

A Yankee land, thanks to the Irish and the Jews

By AARON HOWARD 25.FEB.10

Mick Moloney needs no introduction to fans of Irish music. His work as an academic in collecting and recounting the Irish-American experience through music is possibly peerless. And, Moloney’s version of “There Were Roses” is one of the greatest Irish songs of all time.

Moloney’s latest project, the CD “If It Wasn’t For the Irish and the Jews” (Compass), breaks new ground by exploring the Hebrew-Hibernian connection in early-American popular music. The repertoire on this CD comes mostly from vaudeville and musical revues, the most popular forms of mass entertainment in the United States between 1880 and 1920.

As Moloney describes in his excellent liner notes, vaudeville was an essential part of nearly every American urban community. The form was a fusion of many traditions, including the Yiddish theater. Vaudeville, especially on the East Coast, reflected the skills and tastes of immigrant audiences.

For performers, who usually performed four to five times a day, the goal was to develop a signature song that could connect with audience after audience. Most performers relied on professionally produced material, music crafted by lyricist/composer teams. And, that’s where Moloney discovered a large number of historic Irish-Jewish collaborations. Moloney explains that by 1890, the popular music business began to shift from being an Irish to a Jewish enterprise. Both audiences clearly responded to “nostalgia” songs, pieces about the “old sod” as a song like “Along the Rocky Road to Dublin” reflects. And both audiences embraced songs that spoke of the contributions to America made by immigrants as “If It Wasn’t for the Irish and the Jews.”

In addition to nostalgia, these Irish and Jewish song crafters created tunes that reflected the real-world immigrant experience, such as “When McGuinness Gets a Job.” This song, written in 1880, reflects the unemployment and dislocation suffered by Irish workers displaced by newly arrived Italian immigrants who were willing to do pick-and-shovel labor for “40 cents a day.” Another tune on the CD, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier,” I remember hearing as a child, sung by my grandmother. It was an anti-war tune that was very popular prior to the American entry into World War I. The tune quickly was replaced on the stage by the Irish-Jewish patriotic ditty, “America, Here’s My Boy.”

The performances on this CD – all contemporary – are performed ably by a cast of top Irish musicians that includes John Doyle, Susan McKeown and Joannie Madden, as well as Vince Giordano and The Nighthawks. While it would have been nice to experience more of the Jewish side of the collaboration other than the title song, I want to recommend highly this CD for those interested in American popular music history and, of course, for Irish music fans.