The Dady Brothers, Irish Music, and the Power of Place in Postwar America

The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem were central figures in the revival of traditional Irish music in postwar America and Ireland. Liam Clancy, the charismatic front man of the group, concludes his memoir The Mountain of the Women (2002) by reflecting, somewhat ironically, on the decisive question posed by his initial brush with fame and fortune in the early 1960s: should he return to small-town Ireland, with all its provincial lunacy, or remain in cosmopolitan New York, with all the bohemian lunacy of Greenwich Village where he and his brothers first made their mark?¹ Clancy’s dilemma was a starker version of the one facing the generation of Irish Americans who came of age in the decades following World War II: whether to stay in the old ethnic urban villages or leave for the “wider” worlds of 1950s suburbia or 1960s counter culture. Clancy chose Greenwich Village—a ticket out of Old-World provincialism that nonetheless required him to spend a career singing folk songs that celebrated the life of the world he had left. Most Irish Americans of his generation also chose some version of the wider world: with perhaps more sentiment than irony, many Irish Americans found in traditional Irish music—from the Clancy Brothers to the Chieftains to Riverdance—a way to connect to Irish culture free from the traditional social constraints that historically shaped that culture.

Still, reports of ethnic fade have been greatly exaggerated. Many Irish continued to live in the old urban enclaves well into the late 1970s and the revival of traditional Irish music was an essential component of the broader ethnic revival that emerged in post-1960s America.² The local dimension of this revival is well illuminated by looking at the life and career of the Dady Brothers, a duo based in Rochester, New York. Far from the great Irish music centers of New York, Boston, and Chicago, John and Joe Dady developed a synthesis of folk, bluegrass, and Irish music that speaks powerfully to the place of Irish music amidst the broader developments in American popular music in the postwar decades. Just as significant, at a time when popular music played such a key role in drawing young Americans out of the communities of their birth, the Dadys succeeded as full-time, professional musicians largely because of their commitment to the local bonds of neighborhood, church, and community.

The local world that shaped the Dady Brothers has been both the glory and shame of the American Irish—and Irish American intellectuals have felt that dividedness acutely. From the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, Irish Catholics were a virtual synecdoche for everything that struck WASP America as foreign and dangerous about the city. The anti-Catholic vitriol inspired by Al Smith’s 1928 run for the presidency suggested that little had changed since the Philadelphia Bible Riots of 1844. Ironically, the next two decades saw Irish Catholics gain center stage in the most dominant popular culture medium of the day, Hollywood film. Culminating in Going My Way (which won multiple Academy Awards in 1944), innumerable Hollywood films held up the world of Al Smith as not merely acceptable, but exemplary.³ Yet, reflecting on this cultural moment, such Irish American intellectuals as Daniel Patrick Moynihan have bemoaned the failure of the Irish in America to develop a high culture capable of transcending the level of popular entertainment represented by sentimental Hollywood films. Moynihan saw the American Irish as cut off from the earthy vitality of their working-class roots and prevented by a repressive Catholicism from embracing the modernist Irish literature of Yeats and Joyce; they seemed to live culturally adrift in a lower middle-class mediocrity.⁴

By the standards of high modernism, Irish American mediocrity was perhaps nowhere more glaring than in the field of music. The Hollywood films that redeemed the world of urban Irish Catholicism also revived the popularity of the Tin Pan Alley songs of Irish America that were once so central to American musical theater and vaudeville. In this...