This post bridges the favorite topics here of Irish traditional music (ITM) and the autoharp. Two links will be considered, both geographical, but of vastly different extents. The more compact of the two spans a part of South Chicago and is mapped in the banner image. It was regularly traversed by Francis O’Neill, whose seminal collections of Irish dance tunes are well known in ITM circles.
His work is perhaps less immediately familiar to autoharp folks but any who play such music are likely to have material from O’Neill’s The Dance Music of Ireland, published in 1907, somewhere in their repertoires. There is no basis for suggesting that he had a reciprocal interest in the autoharp. However, he was involved with the Chicago World’s Fair held in 1893 and would all but certainly have noted the display of autoharps there (detailed in an earlier post).
The present text is not intended to inflate the significance of that encounter. From the autoharp perspective, the aim is to whet further interest in O’Neill’s work. Where his monumental role is already recognized, a bit of biographical and contextual detail is added to its discussion.
The 1890 edition of the Lakeside Annual Directory of the City of Chicago includes a listing for “O’Neill Francis, sergt. of police, city hall, h. 5448 Drexel boul.” The 1900 United States Federal Census records him at the same residence, as a Police Captain. The 1890 census documents were destroyed in a fire but a Chicago city directory from 1889 lists Sgt. O’Neill’s residence as 3723 Emerald Avenue. He would therefore have relocated sometime between the collation of the two annual directories.
In a memoir written in 1931, edited and published posthumously as Chief O’Neill’s Sketchy Recollections of an Eventful Life in Chicago, he states that he was promoted to lieutenant on 1 January 1890. It’s a fair guess that this may have occasioned his move to a nicer neighborhood. However, he was an active investor in real estate and may have been planning the relocation in any case. A more interesting question is whether this brought him to a three-minute walking distance from what would become the site of the World’s Columbian Exposition (aka Chicago World’s Fair) by coincidence or design.
The decision to stage that event in Chicago was enacted by the US Congress on 25 April 1890. The Official Directory of the World’s Columbian Exposition, May 1st to October 30th, 1893 details the subsequent administrative decisions, with the “World’s Columbian Commission” selecting a contiguous site in Jackson Park and the Midway Plaisance on 2 July 1890. In the cited memoir, O’Neill discussed corresponding aspects of policing the site. He was initially transferred to the district in which both it and his new home were located, ostensibly as a matter of personal convenience. There were also plans to promote him to captain of that district but they were thwarted by political opposition as the event approached.
Advancement of the candidate site would have been well underway by the time O’Neill decided to move nearby, assuming that the formal resolution had not already been made. The extent to which this was an active factor in his personal deliberation remains a matter of speculation. Either way, he was left with easy access to a venue where Ireland and its music figured prominently.
An Irish Village was planned for location on the Midway. However, a conflict between the primary organizers resulted in this becoming two separate installations. They are labeled on the map as the “Irish Village” and “Irish Industries” but the latter was generally referred to as the Irish Industrial Village. An event at its music hall was described at some length in an illustrated article in the 23 July 1893 issue of The Sunday Inter Ocean, beginning:
Danced for Prizes
Irish Lads and Lasses Make Merry in Blarney Castle
The Irish took Ireland, or, to be more explicit, they took possession of Lady Aberdeen’s village at The Fair. The cause of this incursion was the first of a series of dancing contests. Jimmy Touhey petted and squeezed his pipes until they yielded jigs and reels that no Irishman’s feet could resist.
O’Neill described the piping at the other Irish Village in his Irish Minstrels and Musicians, published in 1913. (It is possible, but not certain, that James and Patrick Touhey were related.)
While Turlogh McSweeney, the “Donegal Piper,” may have fittingly represented an antiquated and oppressed Ireland, playing his ancient instrument outside the entrance to Mrs. Hart’s “Donegal Castle,” at the World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, the hopes and aspirations of a regenerated nation were pleasingly typified in “Patsy” Touhey, the spruce young man in corduroy breeches and ribbed stockings, whose expert manipulation of a great set of Taylor pipes made him the centre of attraction within.
The main exhibition hall was beyond the two Irish Villages along the path from O’Neill’s residence. He played the flute, fiddle, and bagpipes, justifying the surmise that he sought out those on display in the large exhibition. If nothing else, his interest in the flute would surely have led him to the booth operated by John C. Haynes & Co., a significant purveyor of such instruments (seen in the company’s 1883 catalog).
It was immediately adjacent to the one where the C. F. Zimmermann Co. showed their autoharps. Whether or not O’Neill had any interest in them, the walk he took from home into the exhibition hall extended the full way to their display. Even if he didn’t give it more than a fleeting glance, placing him at that spot in the exhibition brings us to the terminus of the literal bridge that has fueled this narrative so far.
The second bridge lacks physical attributes but has a clearly describable geographical span nonetheless. It connects regions that have contributed to a stock of dance tunes common to both sides of the Atlantic. O’Neill broached its discussion in The Dance Music of Ireland, cited above. He introduced this work (culled from the broader O’Neill’s Music of Ireland, published in 1903) with general remarks and commentaries on selected tunes.
It is at once apparent how difficult is the task of compiling a book of exclusively Irish dance music. The origin of many hornpipes, well known under various titles among the Gaelic and English speaking races, is not easily determined. The hornpipe commonly known as the “Flowers of Edinburgh,” No. 920, at once suggests a Scotch origin, yet when compared with “Beside a rath” (Cois Leasa), No. 943, its evolution from the latter traditional Irish strain becomes evident.
He doesn’t explain why he believed Beside a rath to be the elder of the similar tunes nor, other than its title, what was decisively Irish about it. The Flower of Edinburgh is found in at least two collections of Scottish tunes, also published in Scotland a century before O’Neill’s birth. One appeared in 1747, targeted to the German [i.e. transverse] flute, and the other in 1748 for the “Harpsichord, Violin, German Flute, or Hoboy.” Furthermore, The Flowers of Edinburgh had found its way to the Southern mountain areas of the USA well before O’Neill’s analysis of its origin.
The following two videos contrast how it is played as an Irish fiddle tune, and American old-time style.
One of the salient differences is the extensive use of a battery of characteristic ornaments in the native-style performance of ITM. Kevin Burke discusses this in a tutorial video addressing the question, “How could an American fiddler sound more like an Irish fiddler?” My interest in a similar comparison of national styles centered on the autoharp has since become quite the hobbyhorse on this blog.
It was introduced a few years ago in a post titled The Autoharp in Irish Traditional Music, by rephrasing the question as, “How could an autoharper who plays Irish tunes American style sound more like an Irish traditional musician?” That post traced the occurrence of the autoharp in Ireland beginning with a documentary film produced there in 1967. I’ve since located Scottish recordings from the early 1930s where the instrument is played in a similar manner (to be detailed in a coming post).
Nobody knows when or where The Flowers of Edinburgh was first given a whirl on an autoharp. But I personally wouldn’t be surprised if the tune appeared in one or another of the collections for that instrument published during the late 19th century in Europe and the USA. Here is a recent recording made at the western end of that span.
This meshes well with the preceding old-time performance. There are further considerations from the Irish perspective. The “jigs and reels that no Irishman’s feet could resist” are played more quickly than hornpipes. This also applies to the American style, but doing so with idiomatic Irish ornamentation presents an appreciable further challenge.
The final recording here is of the reel The Maid behind the Bar (in a version now more commonly known as Kiss the Maid behind the Barrel) played at the requisite tempo by Patrick Touhey, introduced by Francis O’Neill. The good news for the aspiring Irish-style melodist autoharper is that when not accompanying actual dance, more relaxed tempos are generally quite acceptable. The bad news is that, when seasoned trad musicians are free to do so, they often play jigs and reels at truly breakneck speeds.