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  • Identity, Nationalism, and Irish Traditional Music in Chicago, 1867–1900
  • Michael D. Nicholsen

On the evening of October 8, 1871, the family of fiddler Pat McLaughlin and his wife gathered for a celebration at 137 De Koven Street. The cousin of McLaughlin's wife had just arrived from Ireland, coming to the United States for the first time. McLaughlin cheerfully provided his instrument to initiate a party that he hoped none would forget, playing music for a dance held in his visiting relative's honor. As it happened, the occasion proved a memorable event, but not because the guests danced exuberantly to the strains of melodies culled from home. The dance was instead interrupted by massive walls of flame at around nine o'clock that night. Chicago's Great Fire of 1871, which destroyed two-thirds of the city starting with McLauglin's street, cut the festivities short. McLaughlin's neighborhood was not merely leveled by the blaze, but was in fact the initial site of the Great Fire's combustion.1

McLaughlin's dance encapsulates two contending forces in the lives of Irish traditional musicians. One was the desire to transplant the art of traditional music brought from their home country through continued performance in Chicago. A second force was the reality of overwhelming social change. Life in the urban United States was not the same as existence in rural Ireland, where a devastating citywide inferno would have been unthinkable. While traditional musicians in Ireland could usually count on an audience, as practitioners in the "second city" often found it difficult to attract attention, the majority of the Irish in Chicago were uninterested, or only casually interested, in traditional arts. Most of the city's Irish population advocated assimilation through the creation of a new ethnic American identity that was based on Catholicism, nationalism, and invented celebrations of Irish heritage—such [End Page 111] as the American way of celebrating St. Patrick's Day—rather than on traditional arts.2

In late nineteenth-century Chicago, alongside the majority of Irish immigrants who sought a new"'hyphenated" ethnic identity, traditional musicians remained energetic members of a minority who favored some cultural persistence. Irish musicians sought to resolve the tension between themselves and the assimilationist majority by associating their art with the nationalist aspirations of other Irish Americans, and attempting to transplant, while simultaneously transforming, the performance of traditional music in Chicago.3 Musicians in Chicago played essentially the same instrumental dance tunes that collectively crystallized in seventeenth-century Ireland, involving the same core repertoire of jigs, reels, and horn pipes. The fact that the tunes and genre were imported represented a large-scale cultural transplantation. But while the music itself remained consistent, its contexts changed drastically.

Chicago's traditional music devotees of the late nineteenth century perceived their art as a direct connection to Ireland. Articles in Chicago's Irish American weekly newspaper, the Chicago Citizen, the strongly nationalist periodical published by John Finerty—a former member of the United States congress and president of the United Irish Societies of Chicago—indicate that some musicians and observers considered Ireland and the United States to be linked by a causeway of music. An 1888 article reprinted from the Irish National Review argued that, the people, "whether at home by the fireside or abroad in crowds, love to hear their national songs and tunes, and jigs and reels well played." The article further stated that "we deal with a subject that is dear to the heart—one which cannot fail to awaken a thousand fond recollections. It is suggestive at once of dancing, of singing, or playing some musical instrument . . . [End Page 112] nigh the crossroads on a Sunday evening, as the music of the Irish pipes or violin break on her [the listener's] ear?"4

A letter to the editor of the Citizen in 1893, written by the uilleann piper, police officer, and County Kildare native John Ennis, claimed that there existed a strong interest in his instrument shown by the prominence of piping at Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition as well as by the skill of pipers in America. According to Ennis, "The professional players are quite numerous throughout...

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