A Singing Ambivalence
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A Singing Ambivalence

American Immigrants Between Old World and New, 1830-1930

Victor R. Greene

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eBook - ePub

A Singing Ambivalence

American Immigrants Between Old World and New, 1830-1930

Victor R. Greene

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A Singing Ambivalence is a comprehensive examination of the ways in which nine immigrant groups—Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, Eastern European Jews, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Chinese, and Mexicans—responded to their new lives in the United States through music. Each group's songs reveal an abiding concern over leaving their loved ones and homeland and an anxiety about adjusting to a new society. But accompanying these disturbing feelings was an excitement about the possibilities of becoming wealthy and about looking forward to a democratic and free society.

Distinguished historian Victor Greene surveys an extensive body of songs of known and unknown origins that comment on the problems immigrants faced and reveal the wide range of responses the newcomers made to the radical changes in their new lives in America. His selection of lyrics provides useful capsules of expression that clarify the ways in which immigrants defined themselves and staked out their claims for acceptance in American society. But whatever their common and specific themes, they reveal an ambivalence over their coming to America and a pessimism about achieving their goals.

A Singing Ambivalence examines the familiar sentiments of new immigrants to the United States, while at the same time conveying from an aesthetic viewpoint how immigrants expressed their hopes and difficulties through song. This is an important volume that will be welcomed by scholars of music and immigration history.

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Year
2013
ISBN
9781612773902

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1

The Irish

Exploited Exiles

The Irish were the largest group of English-speaking immigrants (some also spoke Gaelic) and came to America in massive numbers over a very long period of time, three centuries to the present. These features of their coming, along with their extraordinary success in political activity in the New World, probably made them more familiar to Americans than any other minority group. As important as the Irish urban political machines in providing the group’s image to outsiders were their popularity, prominence, and their lively involvement in public entertainment, particularly musical performance.
For much of the late nineteenth century, they so dominated American vaudeville that even the most hostile public stereotype of the Irish was also connected with music. The familiar image was a simian Irishman with a caubeen hat, dancing a jig, and clutching the well-known artifacts of that culture, a shillelagh, clay pipe, and a whiskey bottle or jug.1 Certainly, at least as much as any other immigrant group, Americans of many different origins know that the Irish possessed a richly expressive musical culture.
Song reflected almost every part of their daily lives. To the delight of contemporary Irish and the pleasure of all Americans, the popularity of and indeed the fascination with that rich repertoire of ballads and dance continue down to the present. Thus it is no wonder that Irish song has clearly conveyed emotional feelings about the various aspects of the group’s immigrant experience. Whether lyrics describe the traumatic departure from home, family, and loved ones simultaneously with the need for leaving; the physical and psychological ordeal of crossing the Atlantic; or the hardships of settling in the United States, another potentially hostile Anglo-Protestant society, the Irish vocalized about it in song. Or better put in succinct terms, they provided listeners with their feelings about their migratory experience.
This kind of communication in music, then, is valuable to any historical observer. One authority has asserted directly that this type of group expression was an ideal indication of the most intimate sentiments of the masses. The songs of the Irish emigration, he has pointed out, are “closer in spirit to the feelings and expression of ordinary people who endured the experience than any other kind of historical document. When an emigrant song is sung,” he concludes, “it imparts not only the facts but emotion, and in an especially memorable way.”2
It is important to remember the ways that Irish ballads were disseminated, those about emigration and otherwise. Most were readily available to people of any station for most of the nineteenth century because they were printed cheaply and heard widely. Normally most were composed and sung by street singers at any time in the open, and many appeared printed on broadsheets sold throughout the country at a penny per sheet.3
While the various topics of the songs are similar to those of other American arrivals and refer to feelings about departure, homesickness, and the lure of and disappointment in the new land, making for a general pattern, still a distinctive character of this Irish musical genre is also clear. The songs had strong political overtones, for overall they suggest that emigrants were generally not voluntary travelers but considered themselves as unfortunate exiles, forced from their home by the oppressive British majority.4 Even when they expressed the advantages of America (which was a common feature of the songs of other immigrant groups), the greater freedoms it offered the newcomers, and the potential for economic opportunity, they still considered themselves reluctant emigrants, expecting one day to return to a free homeland.
But again, a distinctive feature of the Irish emigrant ballads throughout the century was its heavy emphasis on politics. Most, but not all, of this musical expression told about the dissatisfaction and objection with British-Protestant exploitation and mistreatment. This placing of the responsibility for the forced diaspora on the English did not mean that all who considered emigration saw departure as a solution. Many tunes stated that moving across the Atlantic was too much of a sacrifice to the families and that the dangers of going west far outweighed the benefits. It was, in fact, the rare piece that was totally optimistic about the move to America. While it may have been a better place to live in peace and get a better income, it still was not entirely the paradise that other groups may have expressed in their music. Life was hard in the New World as well.
In any event only the rare statement, especially in the earliest songs brought out before the Civil War, was enthusiastic about going abroad and achieving success. America too, some lyrics reminded listeners, was dominated by an Anglo Protestant culture that, especially in the era of the Protestant Crusade (1830–55), was also a threat to the Irish Catholic way of life. As noted below, the leading Irish songs about work (in particular) sung in free America lamented anti-Irish economic discrimination.
The latest historical interpretations are consonant with the melancholy character of Irish emigrant music. The consensus of the best standard histories of Irish immigration is that the peasant masses left reluctantly with a feeling of banishment from their homeland; that mistreatment was always very much on their minds. As additional evidence, academic writers thus usually use the term “emigration” rather than “immigration” to describe the movement of those who left Ireland for America.5 Thus while a review of Irish songs does not revise the standard interpretation of immigrants as exiles, it does more pointedly reveal the personal, emotional discomfort emigrants felt about their move overseas. It was a gloomy sentiment that worsened over the nineteenth century.6
For a full understanding of how the songs reflect that immigrant mentality and its modification over time, it is necessary to review briefly the historical context in which that musical expression occurred. The total number of nineteenth-century Irish coming to America was quite large, probably over four million. The few who appeared before 1800 were both Protestant and Catholic who often lived together in Irish communities along with a number of political refugees who fled after participating in unsuccessful insurrections.
The mass Irish exodus began just after the Napoleonic Wars, around 1820, with Catholics being the vast majority by the early 1830s. The numbers fluctuated over the entire era of mass movement, 1815–1922, rising to and falling from a high point in midcentury. About one million left up to 1845; one and one-half million just after the famine, 1845–1855; another million, 1856–1870; and a final one-half million, 1870–1922.7 The leading demographic and economic causes were the high birth rate and the failure of the potato crop, the group’s main food source, that began in the 1820s and became widespread, causing severe famine and poverty by the mid-1840s. Other causative factors were the consolidation of landed estates, the high taxes, the loss of agricultural markets due to free-trade legislation, and, of course, the ongoing hatred of British rule as a result of landlord exploitation and property foreclosures. The tradition of the peasants singing about their troubles actually predates the 1800s, particularly their bitterness directed at the many absentee landowners and Protestant-English control.
One of the earliest tunes initially popular before 1820 already spoke about themes that would be repeated later. It conveyed that welling up of conflicting emotions over whether to leave the traditional home or remain, a torment that would beset many emigrants. On the one hand was the miserable life in the Irish village caused by closed markets, while on the other, the economic and political opportunity that America offered. Hence while expressing the reluctance to leave, it also glorified the society overseas with the appropriate title, “The Green Fields of America.”
Farewell to the land of the shillelagh and shamrock,
Where many a long day in pleasure I spent;
Farewell to my friends whom I leave here behind me,
To live in poor Ireland if they are content;
Though sorry I am to leave the Green Island,
Whose cause I support both in peace and in war,
To live here in bondage I ne’er can be happy,
The green fields of America are sweeter by far.
I remember the time when our country did flourish,
When tradesmen of all kinds had both work and pay,
But our trade all has vanished across the Atlantic
And we, boys, must follow to America.
No longer will I stay in this land of taxation,
No cruel master shall rule over me;
To the sweet land of liberty, I’ll bid good morrow,
In the green fields of America we will be free.8
Characteristically, other emigrant songs, although not most, through the entire immigration period viewed America as a sanctuary of freedom and opportunity for the oppressed Irish. This was also true of the tone of letters sent back in the years around midcentury.9
Even the most optimistic hopes also expressed misgivings. “McKee’s Farewell to Ireland” appeared in 1855, composed by a Bravo McKee, a schoolmaster from Belfast who also idealized the nation across the Atlantic. This song describes the conflicting thoughts of an imminent emigrant, one who also is reluctant to leave his native land. The piece reiterates the profound ambivalence that the bulk of the songs suggest, expressing mental anguish and uncertainty. The narrator’s final decision to depart was thus a very painful one, for he deeply loved what he had to leave behind. Note too the political undertone of his melancholia, the signature feature of the Irish emigrant song.
Farewell lovely Erin, the land of my fathers,
These daisy hills I will wander no more;
I’m now going to cross o’er the Atlantic Ocean
My fortune to try on a far distant shore.
Yet the land of my fathers I still will remember;
The place of my birth shall be dear to my heart;
I will think of my home in a far distant nation,
I’m not reconciled with these valleys to part.
The Trade has got low and the wages are scanty
And Erin’s best friend from our land has now fled
Which makes many a bold hero to venture
Across the wide ocean in search of some bread.
There’s nothing in Ireland but want and starvation
The rents are so high we’re scarce able to pay
With cesses [sic] and taxes they always perplex us,
There are no such impostures in Amerikay. . . .
Farewell to my country the land of my sire
Adversity drives me away from your shore
May fortune yet smile on your green daisy hills
When wide foaming billows between us do roar,
So come my brave boys we will tarry no longer
We will go to the country they call liberty
We’ll leave this poor nation in so much distress
And enjoy equal rights in Amerikay.
See how many thousands are gone from this country,
And are now living in the United States.
They have no rents to oppress them nor tax to distress them
Nor no one to call at their door for Poor Rates.
There is no tyrant there to claim their habitation,
Nor find heavy burdens for to keep them down.
They have liberty stamped on the coin of the nation,
That shows they have neither landlords nor Crown.
In all this hyperbole about his better life to come, the lyricist still comes to the painful conclusion that he will never be able to return, “all these green valleys I’ll see no more.”10
The bulk of the more popular ballads return again and again to those opposing pressures on those considering departure. And time did not relieve them. On the one hand, early in the century, difficult living conditions beset the homeland only to be intensified in midcentury by the more horrendous calamity of the famine. The circumstances more forcefully encouraged emigration. Yet on the other hand were conflicting emotions to motivate them to leave, such as the guilt over deserting the family when it was in need. Departure would mean the breaking up of their home, abandoning the beauty of the countryside, and the move to a far, distant land, away from lovers, family, and friends.
One of the more personal emigrant lamentations in this regard was the widely known broadside ballad of 1809 from Ulster, “Paddy’s Farewell.” The first section of the piece refers to the “hard fate” at home of poverty, the loss of freedom, the distress, and the general oppression. It concludes with Paddy’s uncertain hope and a rationalization for departing for the sake of his loved ones. Although “America . . . bound,” he was going to seek his fortune to adequately support his “virtuous wife and children dear.” His only consolation is that he would “return once more [and] enjoy the felicity with thee on the Shamrock shore.”11
Probably the best-known and frequently performed piece that highlights another emigrant dilemma over whether to stay or leave was a conversation between a father and son. In this case it offers another rationalization for leaving: to win Irish freedom for those at home.
The youth first asks his father the embarrassing question why he fled abroad when he so loved his home and country, then under the heel of the British. To rationalize his flight and to ease his guilt, he replies that his departure would actually help Ireland. He had intended to recruit other emigrants already in America to continue to work for Irish freedom abroad. At any rate the song still reviews the ...

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