Our Lost Sisters - The Amalgamationists

I first became aware of their existence in faded penciled sketches from the dance halls of New York’s Five Points neighborhood.

Perhaps it was their happy faces that made the young Irish women and their African-American dancing partners seem so natural and unaffected. Only later did I discover that these particular inter-racial couples were called Amalgamationists.

The very word itself seems Dickensian and has long gone out of currency. But Amalgamationists were a well-known presence in the socially liberated environs of the Five Points.

Picture New York in 1844 - on the cusp of the great Irish Potato Famine - a raucous, though manageable, port city. Within a decade it had been swamped by up to a hundred thousand hungry, frightened Irish, glad to put their feet down on any steady ground after a brutal trans-Atlantic journey.

It was the first major emigration to the US that contained equal numbers of men and women. The vast majority came from very rural backgrounds. Pete Hamill once put it to me, “the newly arrived Irish saw more people in their first ten minutes on Broadway than they had in all their lives back home.”

They had no qualification for urban living and were instantly thrown into fierce competition for the humblest of jobs. Is it any wonder that some of the men cracked under the pressure and retreated to the many pubs and shebeens of the Five Points, while others headed for California and the Gold Rush.

Irish women didn’t crack – there were children to be looked after; besides a hardscrabble living could be made taking in washing, and there were kitchens to be run and sculleries to be scrubbed in the great Yankee houses uptown.

The African-American men in New York City were mostly sailors, waiters, carriage drivers and dockworkers; they were a step up the social ladder from the arriving Irish. With a shortage of African-American women in Manhattan it was only a matter of time until unions were formed.

It didn’t hurt that dancehalls were mostly African-American owned at a time when dancing was the national pastime; besides, inter-racial socializing had been common in the Five Points for years.

Amalgramationist couples and their children stuck together and moved into the same areas, Hart’s Alley being the best known. A new social experiment was afoot; though viewed suspiciously by wealthy uptown reformers it was not considered a threat because of the apparent stability and compatibility of the couples.

But tensions mounted after the Civil War broke out. The Irish felt they were being discriminated against on the docks whenever African-American longshoremen were hired. Then on Jan 1st, 1863, Abraham Lincoln made his Emancipation Proclamation; the fear amongst the Irish – fanned by unscrupulous Democratic politicians – was that New York would soon be flooded by liberated southern slaves.

The first compulsory draft into the Union army followed soon after; it was bitterly resented by the Irish particularly since the wealthy could choose not to serve for a payment of $300.

On July 13th rioting flared across New York City. African-Americans were attacked and special venom was directed towards their Irish wives. Hart’s Alley itself was besieged and almost set afire.

The Amalgamationists fought back, pouring burning starch from the rooftops onto the rioters. The inter-racial couples held out until the Union Army arrived, but by then the free and easy social climate of the city had changed utterly.

In the following months over 50% of African-Americans moved out of downtown Manhattan and with them the Amalgamationists.

Where did they go? More than likely they were subsumed into African-American neighborhoods in Staten Island, Long Island and the new “colored community” forming up in the farmlands of Harlem.

Where once they were a vital presence, suddenly the Amalgamationists were gone. All that’s left behind is the occasional mention in dusty history books and the happy faces of our lost sisters dancing with their handsome partners in faded sketches from long vanished Five Points dancehalls.

Fat Cats, Cheap Suits, & Celtic Invasion

The music “biz” is hitting new lows – and that’s saying something. Where once fat men in cheap suits up on 57th Street ripped you off with a smile, now faceless young dot.com warriors “lease” your songs and pay fractions of a cent when one is played.

Still, you can sit around lamenting that you didn’t major in computer programming rather than Stratocasters, or you can find other ways of getting paid for making music.

While having a drink with Jon Birgé of Valley-Entertainment we hit upon an alternative: get a great song from each of a dozen fine acts and put out a compilation CD?

Ideally, the artists should be from the same field but have a different artistic sensibility. Since I seem to know every Irish-American band along with their maiden aunts, my gig was to choose the material – Jon to market the CD.

We set a couple of ground rules: bands would get a small advance and a royalty on each CD sold. The bands could also buy the CDs at wholesale cost and mark up accordingly.

Thus each band would be paid a royalty for every CD the eleven other bands sold, along with a first-class introduction to eleven other fan bases. In other words, the more you sell the more you make; the more anyone else sells, the more you make too! And if one song were to take off, then all twelve acts would be in the gravy.

The trick was to enlist the most interesting bands, and choose songs that would not only gel together but appeal to a wide audience. Hosting Celtic Crush on SiriusXM for almost eight years has given me some insight into the latter. I pride myself on finding great songs that have been overlooked in our teeming musical meat market.

It doesn’t take a degree in rocket science. You just have to wade through an ocean of refined mediocrity to find a track that both sparks your interest and contains that ineffable something that will move a mass audience.

Thus I chose a number of overlooked local classics like “You’re So Beautiful” by Pat McGuire, “McClean Avenue” by Shilelagh Law, “22” by Celtic Cross, “Weekend Irish” by Barleyjuice, and “Sullivan’s Lake” by Garrahan’s Ghost.

To bring in a wider Celtic influence I included two Scottish gems: “Clash of the Ash” by Runrig, the best band you never heard of, and “Wacko King Hako” by Peatbog Faeries who put grooves under bagpipes that have to be heard to be believed.

I needed a couple of names for marquee value: Mike Scott gave me a brilliant unreleased version of a Waterboys classic, as did Hothouse Flowers. I tossed in the zany “Uncle Jim” by Black 47, which tells of Fr. Jim Hughes quixotic mission to East Belfast to convert the Rev. Ian Paisley.

The CD is called Celtic Invasion and also contains “The Irish Rover” by Blaggards, the kings of Houston, and “Buile Mo Chroí” by John Spillane, the bard of Cork City. Officially released last week, Celtic Invasion has been picking up radio play all over the country and selling like cold pints in August.
You can get a free download of my “intimate” thoughts on each band at www.celtic-invasion and if such ravings pique your fancy you can purchase the music in digital or CD form – no “leasing” necessary!

Will this idea succeed? I haven’t a clue, but it’s one hell of a compilation that crackles from first beat to last and will shake the dust from the ceiling at any gathering – St. Patrick’s Day or otherwise.

It’s already a success – Your Man Up In Pearl River says it’s the hottest thing since fried bread - and if it breaks even financially then we’ll round up another dozen acts and give them the same opportunity to beat the dot.com leasers!

And if it fails, well we tried to make a difference, and at the very worst I might still have a career ahead of me as a fat cat in a cheap suit up on 57th Street.

Narrowback Dreams/God Bless Eileen Farragher

Since crossing the broad Atlantic I’ve been interested in the effects of dislocation on fellow emigrants and the cultural divide between Irish born parents and their “narrowback” children.

Well, I could have saved myself all those liver-depleting years of field research in pubs, clubs, and festivals because Mike Farragher has just published 50 Shades of Green, Part 2 of his revelatory series, This Is Your Brain on Shamrocks.

Now since Mike has often blamed Black 47 for his descent into the black hole of music journalism, it’s only fitting that I should help dispatch him to Hollywood fame, groupies and all the other frothy perks he’s missed while slaving away as music editor at the Irish Voice.

For, this intrepid ink slinger has hit upon a subject dear to the hearts of many – the relationship between the Irish Mammy and her ingrate of a son.

I once spoke to Angela McCourt on the same subject. Between long drags on her Woodbines she confided that, “Each of my sons has been a private Gethsemane to me.”

Mrs. Eileen Farragher, nee Cleary, of Ballylanders, Co. Limerick is far more discreet, but if Angela was the star among the ashes then Eileen continues to be the heroine of the Shamrocks series. She strides that chaotic stage with a mixture of fortitude, forbearance, and just a hint of refined martyrdom that places her somewhere between Maude Gonne and The Little Flower.

For all their hardships neither of these ladies had to put up with such a callow ne’er-do-well son. Young Mike complains about his mother’s disapproving eye when she notes that he has failed to comply with his Catholic duty of attending Sunday mass. As right she should – the young hooligan!

When faced with the same situation back in Wexford, all Kirwan males rose from their hungover beds at 11:30 of a Sunday morning and hastened down to last mass; that we may have celebrated that holy sacrifice in Simon Lambert’s public house is not the point. We knew how to humor our Irish mother.

Thus I see a great future for 50 Shades of Green. The millions of us who have been model sons can pick up this tome on days of stress and rejoice that we never caused our mothers a grey hair, unlike Mr. Farragher who must have driven his matron into debt and despair with the rinses and highlights she surely needed on a weekly basis.

In the course of this harrowing, if titillating, read I often wondered who might play Eileen Farragher in the movie version of Shamrocks. The actress would need to be both a tragedian and a deft humorist - a cross between Maureen O’Hara and Katherine Hepburn, perhaps?

And what of Mr. Farragher Sr.? Well, Galway men, like their Wexford counterparts, long ago discovered that when sharing a house with a powerful woman, you keep your head down, your hand out, and your opinions to yourself.

Still, you can sense the poor man’s innate Tuam sorrow as he watches his sad sack of a son enter manhood without even a smidgen of the hurling talent of the great Joe Salmon, while wasting away his time at pinball machines tunelessly humming Duran Duran songs.

You can almost hear Mike Sr. sigh, “If ‘twas a life in the music business he wanted, couldn’t he have at least joined The Saw Doctors?”

Despite these and other heartbreaks 50 Shades of Green is a book of ultimate triumph, for to everyone’s amazement, young Mike manages to stay out of Rykers, and ends up with a beautiful wife, two lovely daughters, and eventual redemption in the swamps of Jersey.

So, if you’re feeling depressed, ready to chuck it all in and join the Tea Party, there’s an easier way out. Buy this book and discover Mike’s secret of success. And while you’re at it, attend his upcoming rock & read tour.

I’ll be there with him at the Irish Rep on March 5th raking through his considerable pearls of wisdom – that is if his mother doesn’t brain me first with a belt of her Limerick handbag.

For more information http://www.thisisyourbrainonshamrocks.com

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

           So the Republicans blinked on the “fiscal cliff!” It didn’t take a brain surgeon to see that coming once big business let it be known that playing around with the country’s credit rating was biting the hand that feeds them.

Dickensian budget-slashers turned into fawning lambs overnight when subtly warned that they might need their coffers refilled for the 2014 mid-term elections.

            A little reminder from the Democratic National Committee that it already had a score or more of House Republicans in their electoral cross hairs and guess what? Unrepentant deficit warriors like South Carolina’s Rep. Mick Mulvaney (didn’t he used to play hurling for Kilkenny?) was tripping over himself to sound like a cuddlesome pragmatist.

            Money talks, as they say, and you know what the rest does. The Tea Party experiment is over. Though initially useful and somewhat rustically charming, it proved way too unaccommodating for our brave new interconnected commercial universe.

            Besides, big business belatedly realized that Barack Obama wasn’t Joe Stalin. Sure, he upped income tax rates a hair but he only raised the far more important capital and investment gains taxes to 20%. Now that’s change Wall Street can really believe in!

            Differentiating the forest from the trees has never been hard in this country – just watch where the money is. Right now it’s firmly in the hands of corporate America. Profits have never been higher despite the fact that we’re emerging from the severest financial downturn since the great Depression.

The good times are coming! Everything is pointing towards a solid economic recovery. Inflation is steady, interest rates infinitesimal, new energy fields sprouting nationwide, and holy of holies, productivity is stratospheric while labor costs are at their relative lowest since before World War II. Time for some real money making!

            As for you, Mr. & Ms. Wage and Salary earner, when was the last time you dared ask for a raise? The fear of God has been well and truly put into the whole labor force –are you really going to risk losing your job by being singled out as a profit spoiler, especially with the world and his mother breathing down your neck, resume in hand.

            Not to mention, that with so many lay-offs, you’ve been picking up slack all over the joint: staying late, going the extra mile; hey, your weekends are barely your own – and don’t you dare turn that cell phone off!

            This is the new America. Forget about collective bargaining, you’re on your own, amigo! What’s a union anyway, a bunch of Commies that messes up profits? Trickle-down rules! As long as the guys upstairs are doing well, their crumbs will slide off the table and be gobbled up by the steadily growing percentile of those barely getting by.

            The odd thing is we should already be in better times. Corporations are sitting on vast amounts of cash that could have been invested in expanding the work force and granting wage and salary increases to those who held on through eight bad Bush years and the four disastrous ones he left Obama to clean up.

            The real craziness is that, in the midst of all the corporate accumulation, stockholders have been iced too. Take Apple, the richest company in history with phenomenal profits and massive cash reserves, they’ve paid out a total of two dividends in seventeen years – and still offer employee entry pay of $11.81 per hour, all the while off-shoring jobs – and profits - as if Americans had the plague.

            These omnipotent corporate heads have even managed to subvert good old capitalism. Ever been to a company annual general meeting? No? Well, you’ll be relieved to know that stockholders can vote on practically anything - except the pay-packages of executives.

            But perhaps I’m being insensitive: after all, these plutocrats will need all their bonuses to re-finance their favorite Super-Pacs, what with the mid-term elections only 21 months away.

            So, dance to your daddy, you Republican politicians. Obstructionist Tea Party days are over. The age of ignorance and Sarah Palin are yesterday’s news. The boss is back! But then he never really went away, did he?

Frank McCourt and your Memoir

Frank McCourt, in the wake of his success with Angela’s Ashes, felt that any Irish person who fails to jot down his or her story is beyond an eejit. So what are you waiting for?

I didn’t set out to write my own memoir, Green Suede Shoes; truth is, I was having problems following-up a mildly successful novel when my publisher suggested that I throw a few stories around a dozen Black 47 songs and use the result as a stop-gap.

One thing led to another and after a couple of tales I found myself shoveling through the murky past trying to make sense of an un-sensible life. Unbeknownst, however, I had overcome the first major hurdle to all memoir writing – where to begin?

Right at the beginning, says you! Fair enough, but it’s a rough old trek uphill when your first sentence is, “I was born in the back streets of Ballyhaunis” or “I drew my first breath in Brooklyn.”

I would suggest that you don the old thinking cap and hone in on the first event in your life that continues to have an ongoing effect on you. I was lucky in that I had already written a song, Life’s Like That, Isn’t It, about waiting with my mother for my father’s return home from sea.

It was a beautiful summer morning and as the three of us walked up the Main Street of old Wexford town I heard a long lonely trumpet note and a few steps later saw a guitar in a shop window. Crazy as it may seem, I might not be writing this had it not been for that morning stroll.

I bet something similar happened in your life; you just have to dig deeply enough. If you already know then it’s time you got out the pen and paper or fired up the computer.

You’ll be amazed at what you’ll uncover. The revelations will be painful, joyous, humbling and even hilarious, but they will never be less than interesting, especially as you veer off on tangents you had forgotten existed.

Things will begin to make sense; now and then you’ll even find that adjustments can be made to your current compass, moral and otherwise.

One dilemma you’ll hit early on: how truthful should you be, for full disclosure will hurt many of those around you – and is unvarnished truth worth the pain you’ll cause?

I don’t think so; besides you’ll be up to your neck dealing with the truth about yourself. To paraphrase Pete Seeger – what you leave out may improve what you decide to leave in.

Now you may consider that you have no writing skills to speak of and you may be right. But I guarantee that by the time you get to the end of your story your penmanship will have improved markedly and you will look at other writers with a new appreciation.

On the other hand, the very slow, methodical act of writing will cause you to question facts that you have always taken for granted. Memory is, indeed, subjective; and anyway, even in autobiography one should never let awkward details get in the way of a good tale – a little seasoning only adds to the stew.

You may never write an Angela’s Ashes but you will tell your story – and even more importantly – leave an account of your family history. How many times have you heard the lament – “if only I had asked my parents or grandparents while they were alive?”

In this age of haste and anxiety we have barley time to ask the time of day, and God save us if the jolting vapidity of Facebook and Twitter become the sole narrative of our family history.

Maybe Frank McCourt wasn’t referring to fame or money at all when he declared that every Irish person should write a memoir; perhaps he meant that in the act of confronting our lives we leave an echo of our times for those who come behind us.

Forest and trees.. and that voice!

How are you doing with your New Year’s resolutions?

“It’s damn near the end of the month!” Says your man up in Pearl River. “Will you for god’s sake stop twisting the knife!”

Well, it takes me about a week to recover from playing in Times Square every New Year’s Eve, so bear with me. To add fat to the fire it takes me another fortnight to shovel aside the problems I caused the year before.

Truth be told, however, I tend to make the same resolutions year in, year out – one practical, the other more philosophical.

“God be with the days they used to write about boy bands in this paper,” observes my Pearl River conscience.

So, first for the practical – “Never touch the same piece of paper twice!”

In the current digital age, you’d think this old saw would be for the birds. But I’m still bombarded by paper – bills, threats, demands, and advertisements for everything from Andy Cooney cruises to Bronx cemetery plots. I’ve tried fancy filing trays, shredders, bonfires, you name it – but the paper Tsunami keeps rolling at me.

The only thing that inspires a grand clean-up is the memory of the voice that first suggested I never touch the same piece of paper twice – oozing with moral superiority, curried by the pity she felt for this lesser mortal whose workspace looked like the aftermath of a Nor’easter.

That voice – or it’s memory - still catapults me into action, garbage bag at the ready, shredder chomping, until I can glimpse again the scratched surface of the rickety table that serves as my desk.

She was a major figure in my life back when social media meant getting drunk with journalists at the Bells of Hell; still, I can imagine her practical advice for handling the digital age: “Reply instantly to any piece of important email, ignore all but life and death texts. Don’t answer phone calls, especially from family members.”

Yes, she was indeed a woman of fixed tastes and firm opinions; I still feel bad for the poor unfortunate she ran off with! The last time I saw him the little hair he had left was grey as a ghost.

Ah well, no point in crying over spilt milk; let’s deal with my more philosophical resolution - “Don’t miss the forest for the trees.”

There are many ways this can be applied but I always begin by jotting down the myriad problems that have been taxing my brain.

As I gaze wearily down a list of fifty or more pinpricks, I put a mark next to the really important issues. I can only handle one of these at a time so, being an Irish guy, I pick the least thorny and deal with it.

The solution is often easier than I had anticipated so I feel a towering sense of accomplishment and store away the rest for the following year! No point in going over board, Rome wasn’t built in a day and so on and so forth…

Resolutions aside, it’s still easy to get derailed nowadays. I’m of the firm opinion that the reason we daily lurch from fiscal cliff to political crisis is our refusal to distinguish the forest from the trees. Instead of arguing over every little point we need to sit down and figure out just what kind of country we’d really like to live in.

Of course, that takes listening, and who has time for such a pursuit in our very connected universe. It’s so easy to find some media clown (present company excepted) who not only agrees with us but makes us seem moderate by comparison.

Still, despite all the bluster, we’re really not as far apart as we might seem. We all have a vital stake in the forest; it’s just that it’s so easy to get hung up arguing about the color of the bark on our favorite trees!

Ah well, my desk is showing the first signs of clutter, time to sweep it all into the garbage bag and fire up the shredder before that patronizing voice start ricocheting around in my head again!

Yellow Moon, Shane McGowan, and Polished Dust

“Kirwan,” the old showband head addressed me. “There are only two types of music, good and bad. Now step aside!”

With that he belted into “Down By The Riverside,” and soon had the dance floor “black” with delighted jivers and quicksteppers who had been ominously absent during my previous pop meanderings.

The head’s judgment may still stand but what would he think of today’s polished mediocrity? For with the advent of computer software even your Aunt Gerty can “make a record.”

Not everyone, however, is a songwriter. That breed appears to come in two types: volcanic talents like Van Morrison or Brill Building types who master their craft after years of trial and error.

In one of my other gigs I host Celtic Crush for SiriusXM. This entails a lot of listening – more like scratching around for diamonds in piles of polished dust. One thing you learn quickly on Satellite Radio - every song must be distinctive; with over 100 competing music channels, not to mention the lurking appeal of Howard Stern, each number must capture and hold the listener’s attention or else it’s “c u l8r.”

Originality, unfortunately, is a rarity and though you may long for it like a cat in a tripe shop, you’re more often forced to settle for a dollop of emotion chiseled into some decent lyrics and arresting melodies.

Shane McGowan still stands out for his ability to encapsulate the Irish soul – a rare diamond, indeed; and yet, I often rue the effect he’s had on Irish-American songwriting. While aping the man’s phrasing and subject matter can work on stage before a boozed-up audience, more often than not it comes off as parody in the recording studio.

Far better that Shane’s musical disciples mine his original sources - Brendan Behan, Irish showbands, London punk and Tipperary Trad. Channeling these through the prism of a unique creativity McGowan gave us The Pogues.

Shane would be the first to note that there are still vast virgin tracts of the Irish Folk Tradition to draw from. Time to get cracking, Shaneheads! You have the chops - all you’re lacking is the material and that divine spark of originality necessary to ignite it.

Which brings me to Yellow Moon. You might wonder what’s the connection between the Neville Brothers from New Orleans and anything remotely Irish? Oddly enough, quite a bit!

Yellow Moon has long been one of my favorite albums but I hadn’t listened to it since the 90’s. Was I afraid it wouldn’t stand up – or perhaps I didn’t want to mess with the memory of sharing a stage with them some years back?

Neville is a very popular name in my neck of the woods. Were the Brothers descended from long-ago Wexford emigrants or, as some of you are probably muttering, had their slave masters hailed from the Model County?

Perhaps, both! When Black 47 first played Tipitinas in New Orleans’12th Ward we were treated like royalty by the city’s music lovers and local Irish-Americans.

At the end of our “meet and greet” line stood a dozen or so of what I took to be African-Americans. Each one, however, exulted in trumpeting Irish surnames like Murphy and Doyle. They told me that their forefathers had come to Crescent City in the 1860’s to dig the canals and married “locally.”

Yellow Moon not only stood up - it floored me all over again. Each song was a gem, from the title track to My Blood, from Rosa Parks to A Change Is Gonna Come. It’s the story of a people rooted in one of the world’s great musical melting pots. And, sure enough, beneath Daniel Lanois’ incandescent production, one can glimpse sparks of the Celt.

Listen to Aaron Neville update Sean-Nós on Bob Dylan’s With God On Our Side – itself lifted from Dominic Behan’s Patriot Game - and you feel the ineffable pain of all the world’s dispossessed reclaiming their dignity.

Like much great art, Yellow Moon is timeless and self-reflecting. By flirting with perfection this album allows us to reflect on what we were when we first heard it, while revealing what we have become down the years in between.

It’s a diamond that still sparkles; pulsing with raw humanity it helps us differentiate between genius, and the curse of mediocrity and parody. That’s no small thing in an age of polished dust.