Capturing O'Neill
Upon my return, I showed the book to my colleague Scott Spencer, who was suitably impressed. A short while after that, Mick Moloney popped in and we showed him. He thumbed through with the perfunctory interest of an authority, but his demeanor changed when he saw the inscription and the four dollar price tag. With more than just a hint of jealousy, he explained who McManus was and why the inscription was interesting. It was a real score.
When Scott (to whom I eventually gave that copy of 400 Choice Selections) came up with the idea of a project contextualizing Francis O’Neill’s inscriptions, I thought it was brilliant. O’Neill is a somewhat enigmatic character. Although the work of folks like Nicholas Carolan, Michael O’Malley, and Paul De Grae, and collections like the Dunn Family Collection and the Henebry / O’Neill Wax Cylinder Collection have shed light on the facts of his life and the music he collected, there is still much more to learn, particularly about the Irish America in which O’Neill lived, how he articulated with it, and what it meant to his musical activities. Each inscription in these pages offers potential for a new and better understanding of O'Neill and his place in the history of Irish music, and an exploration of two inscribed volumes found here demonstrate what I mean.
In 1922, O’Neill gave the American polymath Henry C. Mercer an inscribed copy of his Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melody. Sent as “a Tribute to his Kindly Cooperation,” it’s likely O’Neill intended it as a token of thanks following a correspondence about tunes the two shared in 1920, both sides of which are in the Collection of the Mercer Museum Library of the Bucks County Historical Society. They shed a unique light not only on O’Neill’s relationship to a fellow collector but provide insight into how O’Neill perceived “Irishness” in the tunes he was collecting.
Like O’Neill, Mercer had a longstanding interest in Irish music. It was the subject of an article he wrote for an 1896 issue of The Century Magazine, but his interest was evident even earlier, having ten years prior interviewed Boston fiddle players James Norton and Daniel Sullivan. While both were leading musicians in their day, Sullivan was an especially revered figure, particularly among a small coterie of younger players who would prove influential, including his son, Dan J. Sullivan, the brothers William and Michael Hanafin, and Patsy Touhey. When Sullivan died in 1912, he was known as “the foremost exponent of Irish music in America,” a man O’Neill himself described as the “most famous professional fiddler in the eastern states.”1
In a letter Mercer sent O’Neill dated August 27, 1920, Mercer asked about several tunes including one that Sullivan himself had given him, which he found particularly interesting:
[Uilleann pipe maker William] Taylor also told me that Larry Dunn of Rockaway Ave. East New York was then the best reel player on the violin in America, ‘The daddy of them all’ but though I unfortunately missed hearing the latter I heard Daniel Sullivan, whom you mention, in Boston in 1886 who played and wrote down for me the slightly plaintive ‘Kitty O'Neils Jig’ which I cannot find in your lists. At the same time in 1886 I heard the eccentric James Norton play Lady Blains Strathspey and a very stirring jig in splendid style on a very small violin which jig he refused to write down for me after a good deal of swearing and said he would not sell to Ryan for five dollars neither did he give me the name of the jig.2
In his response, O’Neill addressed each of the tunes Mercer asked about, including “Kitty O’Neil’s.” Despite not having the tune in hand, he replied to say that “Kitty O’Neill’s [sic] is an American composition and by no means Irish in tone.” Likening it to a tune that appeared in Ryan's Mammoth Collection (and by extension, a related tune that appeared in another period collection, Howe’s 1000 Fiddle Tunes) he continued, “it is not even in Irish rhythm, being of a class called ‘straight jig.’ It would be out of place in my collection if it is the tune I know.”3
Donald Meade parsed the late nineteenth century term “jig” in his extensive work on Kitty O’Neil and the “champion jig” that O’Neill referenced (2014:10), explaining that it not only signified a range of steps danced to tunes in common “jig” times like 6/8, 9/8 and 12/8, but it also referred to dances for syncopated tunes in 2/4, 4/4 and 2/2 meters.4 These latter jigs, known as “straight jigs,” were indeed different from Irish jigs, typically American in origin, and, perhaps most importantly, came to prominence on the variety and vaudeville stage through minstrelsy and Irish caricature.
Mercer, sensitive to the almost clinical dispassion in O’Neill’s reply, softened his enthusiasm, telling him that Sullivan’s playing, “seemed to lack the fire and spirit of James Norton’s music, who raked off his jigs and strathspeys.”5 But in his reply he included the music manuscript Sullivan had written down for him anyway, if only to prove that “this Kitty O’Neil’s is entirely different from Howe’s version.”
Thanks to Nick Whitmer, who discovered this manuscript at the Mercer Museum Library of the Bucks County Historical Society and shared it with me.
What Sullivan gave Mercer was a tune more widely known as the “Idlewild,” an American composition in 2/4 that appeared in Ryan’s Mammoth Collection where it was described as a “jig.” It confirmed O’Neill’s objections that it was both modern and didn’t “sound” Irish in tone or rhythm.6
O’Neill’s response to the manuscript was curt and almost dismissive. “‘Kitty O’Neill’s jig,” he wrote, “is a modern composition that would be out of place in my collections.”7 Writing about this correspondence in his book The Beat Cop, O’Neills’s biographer Micheal O’Malley rightly said “clearly the [tune] had too much of the American stage for O’Neills taste: redolent of city life, invested with show business gimmicks, and contaminated by the minstrel show” (63-66).8
There’s a lot to take away from this correspondence. If the inscribed copy of Waifs and Strays that opened the door to this line of research was, as I suspect, a product of the O’Neill/Mercer correspondence, then Mercer’s enthusiastic cooperation was finely rewarded, indeed, with an O’Neill edition. But through this example we learn more about the details of O’Neill’s collection habits and tastes, things that are important to a fuller understanding of the man and his motives.
Another inscribed volume in this project tells a different sort of story about O’Neill, one that complicates his position in the Gaelic revival in the early 20th century. In 1907, O‘Neill sent Rev. Peter C. Yorke an inscribed copy of his Dance Music of Ireland. It read simply, “To Rev. Peter C. York [sic] D.D. / Editor, "The Leader” / with compliments / Capt Francis O’Neill.” Like O’Neill, Yorke was a well known supporter of Irish culture and in 1899 founded the Gaelic League of California, serving for a period as its president. As the publisher of The Leader, a partisan, pro-labor newspaper dedicated to the cause of Irish independence, Yorke’s commitment to Irish culture appeared unwavering.9 While the inscription could surely be interpreted as a personal touch in a gift to a cultural leader and publisher of influence, a little exploration opens up a different possibility.
Unfortunately, Yorke found himself at the center of a dispute that consumed the Gaelic League in America’s national convention in 1902. Úna Ní Bhroiméil explains (51-52) that the reasons for the conflict were twofold.10 Rev. Dr. Richard Henebry, the Gaelic League in America’s national president, had been the professor of Irish at Catholic University, but in 1901 his appointment was not renewed by unanimous vote of the Archbishop, bishops, and laymen on the university’s board of trustees for “non-performance of duty.” Yorke, however, blamed the Gaelic League for his dismissal, arguing that since they were behind earlier public criticism that questioned Henebry’s work ethic and undermined his reputation, Catholic University had no choice but to unjustly “discharge” him, doing so without notice.
Adding to Yorke’s upset was the existence of a faction within the Gaelic League in America that was raising money for the reinterment of Fr. Eugene O’Growney, one of the Gaelic League of Ireland’s founding members and a major figure in the late nineteenth century Gaelic revival. O’Growney died in California in 1899 and was buried in Los Angeles, but a movement emerged shortly after his death to move his body to a plot in Ireland. A fundraising campaign to make this happen was put in place, headed by Stephen J. Richardson, publisher of The Gael newspaper, president of the American-Irish Historical Society, and the Gaelic League in America’s national treasurer. But Yorke believed that because Richardson’s fundraising operation had moved forward without the unanimous permission of the Gaelic League in America, particularly his own, it lacked legitimacy.
As accusations and recriminations flared, a pair of opposed groups emerged. On one side were the “Henebriates,” among whom were Henebry, Yorke, and a group that included P.F. Holden, the League’s national secretary, and Rev. James K. Fielding of Chicago, the League’s national chaplain and Illinois state president. Led by Richardson, the non-Henebriates included some of the League’s top members, including Edward T. McCrystal, the Gaelic League of New York’s president and at the time the Gaelic League in America’s vice president; and eventually, John J. Carroll, the League’s national librarian and another, later, recipient of an inscribed O’Neill edition, who was initially alleged to have been one of Yorke’s confederates but later renounced his involvement.
The non-Henebriates were industrious in their fundraising efforts and never wavered in their criticism of Henebry or his cohort. In fact, they eventually suspected that Yorke wanted to use the O’Growney funds to send Henebry himself to Ireland so he could make claims among Gaelic League leadership that he was a “martyr victim of Irish-American bishop’s prejudice.”11
O’Neill’s name was unwittingly pulled into the drama. Correspondence printed in the August 1902 issue of Richardson’s newspaper The Gael illustrate Yorke’s various antagonisms and show that Fielding, who had been working with Yorke to reinstate Henebry to his old position at Catholic University, had asked Richardson on behalf of the Piper’s Club of Chicago that music be represented at O’Growney’s Ireland reinterment. He suggested the piper Patsy Touhey could go, play at the funeral, and later compete in various feiseanna ceoil as a club representative. “Chief O'Neill and others prominent in the music line,” Fielding flashed, “promise every support to swell the [O’Growney] fund for the purpose.”12
Richardson appeared suspicious of Fielding’s motives and wrote back snidely that if the Piper’s Club wanted to send someone, they could pay for it directly and even suggested they might choose Henebry, an uilleann piper, to be “one of the pall-bearers [and] represent the Music as well as the Language, if such a double representation should be desired, which is not at all clear.” But the idea they “take in representatives of Irish movements other than the Language movement,” he concluded, “does not meet with my approval and I will oppose any such innovation.”
Henebry and Fielding did both attend O’Growney’s funeral in Ireland in September 1903, a grand and solemn affair by all accounts. Yorke did not, instead sending a representative on his behalf. There is no evidence to suggest Henebry was either a pall-bearer or that he performed on the pipes. However both he and Fielding were among those in the American Henebriate delegation who were singled out and excoriated by the Irish press as “fake delegates” and pariahs to the movement. Henebry was even identified as the individual solely “responsible for the spilt in the Gaelic League in America.”13
The Henebry situation was an important moment in the Gaelic League in America’s history because it contributed to long term institutional instability. But it also raises questions about where O’Neill stood in relation to the “Henebriate” faction, as he had such strong musical ties both to Henebry (fiddle and pipes) and to Fielding (flute). Henebry, in particular, had been a great and longtime friend of O’Neill’s, lavishing him at one point with effusive praise in a January 1902 issue of The Gael, in which he described O’Neill’s work with music as having “incalculable value to the cause of Irish nationhood.” After Henebry relocated to Ireland c.1905, their friendship continued, with the two corresponding and O’Neill occasionally sending him cylinder recordings of noted Chicago musicians.14
O’Neill wrote favorably of Henebry in his 1910 publication Irish Folk Music: A Fascinating Hobby, where, in what was surely a gesture of great loyalty, he referred to him in the present tense as “professor of Gaelic in the Catholic University at Washington, D. C.” (47). There, he mentioned John J. Carroll, “an eminent Irish scholar” who gave the Irish Music Club early encouragement and moral support, and James Fielding, “an energetic worker in the cause of a regenerated Ireland,” praising not only his musical talent but the many contributions he made to his own published collections. Accompanying this praise was a full page photo plate of Fielding.
O’Neill maintained an Henebriate’s stance toward the Catholic Church in the United States in later years, criticizing what he saw was its tendency “to suppress Irish culture in return for power and influence” (O’Malley: 250). However, it appears his enthusiasm for Henebry himself would eventually wane. In a 1912 letter to his friend Patrick O’Leary in Adelaide, Australia, he complained of not having heard from his old friend after a shipment of recordings he sent in November 1910 went unacknowledged. “I ask you in all earnestness,” he wrote O’Leary, “what can be hoped for from such people and such a country?”15
These very same recordings were again referenced in a 1918 letter to Rev. Seamus Ó Floinn in Cork, in which he praised Fielding’s revivalist efforts but lamented the local jealousies that stymied his efforts, writing that “long before the days of the great World’s War, the energies of our race and creed have been organized in the interests of church building and the preservation of the faith.” Of Henebry and the recordings, he wrote:
…the Irish have been ever and always impractical dreamers and visionaries letting opportunities slip from their grasp.
Dr. Henebry, too, who carried his assumed infallibility into all his activities, proved to be little but a dreamer. Having spoken and written glowingly of the Chicago pipers and the phonograph records I sent him, I decided to add to his treasures and pleasures by sending him in a box specially constructed for their safety, another dozen by Patsy Touhey, and a dozen by John McFadden, our keenest traditional fiddler, specially made for me in Sergt. Early’s house. The famous philologist never acknowledged their receipt. Neither did he allow the enthusiast John S. Wayland to hear them as I specially requested. The unselfish founder of the Cork Piper’s Club could look at the outside of the encasing box as the great Ph.D informed him that he was much too absorbed in critical investigations just then to spare time to open the box, adding by way of emphasis, ‘Capt. O’Neill himself will have to wait until I get time to write to him.’ I’m waiting yet.
[…] those records […] are well nigh priceless, and yet the Rev. exponent and proponent of ‘true Irish music’ never utilized the opportunities within his reach to encourage a spirit of emulation among the aspiring musicians of his environment.16
With all that has come to light, O’Neill could scarcely have been neutral to Yorke, or the Gaelic League in America’s Henebriate caucus in general. But did O’Neill come to regret his support for Henebry? Did Henebry’s love for Irish music lead O’Neill to overlook the “assumed infallibility” that rankled Richardson and the Gaelic League for so long? Or is it possible the early, ardent support O’Neill gave Henebry became a disruptive element in the Irish Music Club in Chicago’s internal politics and a factor in its eventual demise? Questions such as these were not evident before this project. We are able to see them now because of a simple inscribed copy of the Dance Music of Ireland, presented in these pages.
Thank you to everyone involved in the preparation of “Capturing O’Neill.” It’s a fascinating, unique look at one of the most important figures in Irish music history. I look forward to seeing the new historical directions and perspectives that come from it.
Dr. Daniel T. Neely
Larchmont, New York
Irish Echo Newspaper
Citations
1. Boston Post. 1912. “Funeral of Composer.” June 26: 3; O’Neill 1913: 370
2. Letter from Henry Chapman to Francis O’Neill Mercer, 27 August 1920. From the Collection of the Mercer Museum Library of the Bucks County Historical Society.
3. Letter from Francis O’Neill to Henry Chapman Mercer, 6 September 1920. From the Collection of the Mercer Museum Library of the Bucks County Historical Society. The tune in Ryan’s is “Kitty O’Neil’s Champion” (Mel Bay, ed. 1995:112) which is in cut time (2/2) and has seven parts. The “Kitty O’Neil’s” in Howe’s (Mel Bay, ed. 2001:50) is a two-part tune in 2/4 and appears in a section of tunes subtitled “As played by Jimmy Norton, the Boss Jig Player.” The “Kitty O’Neil’s” in Ryan’s includes the entire “Kitty O’Neil’s” printed in Howe’s among its seven part form. For more about the Ryan’s and Howe’s collections, see Pat Sky’s introductions in the modern Mel Bay editions; cf. Wells, Paul. 2010. “Elias Howe, William Bradbury Ryan, and Irish Music in Nineteenth Century Boston.” Journal of the Society for American Music 4(4): 401-420.
4. Meade, Don. “Kitty O'Neil and Her ‘Champion Jig’: A Forgotten Irish-American Variety Theater Star.” https://blarneystar.com/KittyONeill.pdf (accessed May 29, 2024).
5. Letter from Henry Chapman Mercer to Francis O’Neill, 1 October 1920. From the Collection of the Mercer Museum Library of the Bucks County Historical Society.
6. Nick Whitmer discovered this manuscript tipped into Mercer’s own copy of Ryan’s Mammoth Collection held in the Collection of the Mercer Museum Library of the Bucks County Historical Society. I am grateful to him for alerting me to its existence. It is interesting to note that in Ryan’s, "Kitty O’Neill’s Champion” and “Idlewild” were printed on on facing pages.
7. Letter from Francis O’Neill to Henry Chapman Mercer, 15 October 1920. From the Collection of the Mercer Museum Library of the Bucks County Historical Society.
8. O’Malley, Michael. 2022. The Beat Cop: Chicago’s Chief O’Neill and the Creation of Irish Music. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
9. I am grateful to Nick Whitmer, who inspired this part of the essay and shared many of the sources I used here.
10. Ní Bhroiméil ,Úna. 2003. Building Irish Identity in America, 1870-1915. Four Courts Press: Portland, OR.
11. The Gael (An Gaodal), 1902. “Discord in the Gaelic League.” Nov, vol 21 no 11: 357-61.
12. The Gael (An Gaodal), 1902. “Father Yorke and Catholic University.” Aug, vol 21 no 8: 265-68.
13. The Gael (An Gaodal), 1903. “Funeral of Rev. Eugene O’Growney.” Nov, vol 22 no 11: 388-91, 394.
14. The Henebry / O’Neill Wax Cylinder Collection is housed at University College Cork and is available online at https://epu.ucc.ie/henebry/. In addition, the Irish Traditional Music Archive has a large collection of cylinders made by Henebry himself. These can be accessed at https://www.itma.ie/playlists/henebry-digitised-cylinders/ and https://www.itma.ie/playlists/henebry-digitised-cylinders-2/.
15. Letter from Francis O’Neill to Patrick O’Leary, 12 October 1912. https://www.richiepiggott.com/o-neill-letters.html.
16. Letter from Francis O’Neill to Rev. Seamus Ó Floinn, 15 October 1918. Captain Francis O'Neill Papers, Department of Special Collections, Hesburgh Libraries of Notre Dame. O’Neill had sent Henebry the box to which he refers in 1907. I am grateful to Nicholas Carolan and to Harry Bradshaw for offering their thoughts on this essay and to Bradshaw for first bringing this letter to my attention.