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• 1 2022-09-10T12:49:08-07:00 Note from Michael O'Malley 9 plain 2023-01-21T20:11:52-08:00
  Frances O’Neill was very much a transnational figure. He was acutely aware of himself as Irish, but also had spent most of his life in the US, where he was very successful in navigating one of the most dynamic, creative, violent and turbulent cities in the U.S. or the world. Coming to the U.S. gave him a different sense of what Irish meant. He met Irish people from every county in Ireland, and saw Ireland depicted on vaudeville stages, and in Irish villages at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, and in local festivals and fairs. Like all emigrants, he saw the Ireland of his memory in some tension with these often commercial, stylized or sentimentalized representations. And in Chicago particularly, Irish American politics ran hot around the question of Irish independence: it could get you killed. O’Neill was judicious and careful and mostly avoided the politics of Irish political nationalism, focusing instead on cultural nationalism as advanced by the Gaelic League. He was an extremely important mediator between Ireland, Irish America, and Irish emigrants worldwide.  
  
  O’Neill tended to ignore the better-known songs of Ireland which Irish and Americans would have heard on the stages and in parlors, and instead to focus on instrumental dance tunes, which mercifully for him had no inflammatory lyrics about landlords or famine or martyrs to independence. He was able to position these as “authentic,” the non-commercial expression of ordinary people, a more true, genuine and distinct version of Ireland. This re-presentation of Ireland through music worked as well or better in Ireland than it did in the US: he helped establish an enduring musical conversation between the children of the Irish diaspora and the world they left.
  
  If his work focused on the music of ordinary and typically less-well-educated-people, you can also see how his scholarly impulses put him in a different kind of community, the Anglo-American world of folk music and cultural nationalism. Policing in Chicago could be a brutal business; often violent, often morally ambiguous. He termed the policeman’s job “hardly attractive to a man of acute moral sensibilities or highly developed intellectuality,” meaning a man like himself, and called the work “rough” and “repulsive to the man of refined sensibilities,” constantly exposing the policeman to the “harsh, the corrupt, the vicious and the sordid sides of life.” His ornate and clear handwriting and learned syntax marked him as a scholarly man and expressed the tension between his enthusiasm for the music of “peasants” and the global community of respectable scholars and business people he encountered as collector and chief. He purged Irish music of the sordid and corrupt contaminations of daily life and presented it in a purified and respectable form.
  
  But he was not a snob, and the range of the dedications collected here—to scholars, educators, priests, businessmen, firemen and policemen—captures the broad appeal of Irish music itself. 
  
  Dr. Michael O'Malley
  George Mason University
  
  Michael O’Malley is Professor of History at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He is the author of numerous books in US history, most recently The Beat Cop: Chicago’s Chief O’Neill and the Creation of Irish Music. A companion website to the book is here. He plays the flute sincerely but not well and might even show up at a local session.