Songs for Kellys and Cohens

Aside from the teaming-up of Jews and Irish to write music, in this article in today's Journal I learned about musical instrument.

Last Wednesday on NBC's "Today" show, guest Mick Moloney sat calm, cool and collected. The pre-eminent authority on Irish music in America was there to amplify the correct answers to a "How 'Irish' Are You?" trivia contest conducted by co-hosts Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb. "I was quite impressed at the integrity of their little pop quiz," the professor of Irish studies and music at New York University told me later on the phone. "Besides, why pass up the chance to inform and entertain at the same time?"

Informing and entertaining are the hallmarks of Mr. Moloney's teaching, writing and music-making. His introductory course in Celtic music is consistently oversubscribed by NYU undergraduates; he wrote the widely praised book "Far From the Shamrock Shore: The Story of Irish-American Immigration Through Song"; and he appears on more than 60 albums that showcase his compelling singing and virtuosity on guitar, mandolin, tenor banjo and octave mandolin.

Tenor banjo? Didn't know there  is such an instrument. This is an Antoria SB54 4 sting tenor banjo sold by an UK company I found on the web.

from Wiki: The banjo is a stringed instrument developed by enslavedAfricans in Colonial America, adapted from several African instruments. The name banjo is commonly thought to be derived from the Kimbundu term mbanza. Some etymologists derive it from a dialectal pronunciation of "bandore" or from an early anglicisation of the Spanish word "bandurria", though other research suggests that it may come from a Senegambian term for a bamboo stick formerly used for the instrument's neck. The article continues to differentiate the tenor from the plectrum banjo, it being shorter than the latter. There are alsofive and six string instruments (the plectrum and tenor have four), among others.

The octave mandolin is one of the mandolin instrument family.


But on two recent albums, "McNally's Row of Flats" and "If It Wasn't for the Irish and the Jews" (both on Compass Records), Mr. Moloney took a diverting detour. "I first became aware of the late-19th-century songs of Ned Harrigan, whose grandfather was from Cork, in the home library of Kenny Goldstein," he said, referring to his late dissertation adviser at Penn. "As I learned more about those songs, I had a feeling similar to the one I had when I first encountered Irish traditional music. It was an emotional attachment that became part of me, and it became only stronger after I moved full time in 2004 from Philadelphia to Manhattan, where Harrigan and other songwriters did most of their work."

The title song of "McNally's Row of Flats," an album comprising 14 compositions by the theatrical songwriting team of Irish-American Harrigan and Jewish-American David Braham (his ancestral surname was Abraham), describes densely multiethnic tenement life on Manhattan's Lower East Side: "And it's Ireland and Italy, Jerusalem and Germany, / Chinese and Africans and a paradise for rats. / All jumbled up together in the snow and rainy weather / They constitute the tenants in McNally's row of flats." Written in 1882, the song uses lyricist Harrigan's gimlet-eyed, comic sensibility and Braham's catchy melody to give a sobering glimpse into a struggling stratum of New York at that time.

A name mentioned is Billy McComiskey. I know the name Comiskey, the Chicago White Sox player and owner, but had never heard the name with the Mc prefix.

Other terms that caught my eye were Uilleann pipes, and euphony ("Composers and performers often changed their names for euphony, to fit the musical fashion, or to avoid stereotyping.").