Dick Carroll - evergreentrad

Michael James

I’m as happy as can be, faith, there is merriment in me,
And I’ll try and tell you everyone,
When I came home from work this morn,
I found I was the father of a son.
Ten years we’ve been married this very day,
And we never had a chick or a child,
The thought of this gives me such joy,
Take me word for it, I think I’m going wild.

Chorus—
For he has a puggy little nose, and there’s dimples in his toes,
And we’re going to give a party and a ball,
And we’ll name him Michael James, put his picture in a frame,
And we’ll hang it in the parlor on the wall.

When a man he grows you’ll see, a president he’ll be,
I would never let him run for Alderman,
I’ll buy a horse and dray, and we’ll drive it every day,
You would never find his equal in the land.
He’ll not be a fool, for we’ll send him off to school,
Where they’ll teach him how to row and play ball,
And when he gets some money, we’ll have his picture taken,
And we’ll hang it in the parlor on the wall.

As I have discussed in this column before, logging era singers like Minnesotan Mike Dean typically sang recently composed songs from the American stage alongside older ballads from communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Dean’s repertoire, based on his own self-published songster, seems to have been about half and half. His stage songs are mainly on Irish-American themes common in the late 1800s including: nostalgia for Ireland, stereotypes of urban Irish American life and songs of Irish laborers.

Another category could be “the Irish in American politics.” Three of Dean’s stage songs reference the pursuit of public office and a fourth, “Muldoon, the Solid Man” has its protagonist “called upon to address the meeting” where he “read the Constitution with elocution.” During Dean’s lifetime (1858-1931) Irish-Americans did find success in American politics. Dean lived in Hinckley, Minnesota where Kilkenny native and fellow saloon owner James J. Brennan was the first town president when it was incorporated in 1885. James’ brother Thomas owned the lumber mill in Hinckley and was himself an alderman in St. Paul.

The story behind the song “Michael James” has eluded me for a long time but I recently found the song in an 1881 songster (complete with musical transcriptions!) of compositions by Charles R. Dockstader (1847-1907). Dockstader tried his hand at recycling all the popular song motifs of his day including many riffs on the stage Irishman character. He wrote another song that Dean sang and called “I Left Ireland and Mother Because We Were Poor.”

Dean’s “Michael James” was titled “In the Parlor on the Wall” by Dockstader and was sung on stage by R. M. Carroll, “The Champion Irish Singing Humorist” Harry Kernell and John Sheehan. It appears in the Dockstader Songster published by Philadelphia publisher and music instrument dealer J.W. Pepper in 1881.

The song turns out to have a fine example of the dynamic sort of melody that energized music hall audiences. It also paints a reasonably dignified picture (for its time) of the immigrant father exuberantly pouring his aspirations into his newborn son. I found a March 15, 1902 piece in the The Intermountain Catholic newspaper in Utah about an Ancient Order of Hibernians event in Park City where the chairman of the evening sang the song to an approving crowd. Interestingly, the newspaper wrote: “The programme was appropriate to the occasion and of a nature to please the most critical, while mainly Irish in character there was nothing of the boisterous stage Irishman kind to be seen.”

Two Irish Laborers

We are two Irish laborers, as you can plainly see,
From Donegal we came when small unto America;
We got work on the railroad, but sure it didn’t pay,
So we struck a job to carry the hod for two and a half a day.

Chorus-
Pat, be quick, bring up the brick, the mortar, too, likewise,
Then push along and sing a song as up the ladder you rise;
I always thought it bully fun to be a mason’s clerk,
And have the man on top of the house for to do all the work.

When we go back to Ireland, that dear old Emerald Isle,
Where the stranger finds a welcome and is greeted with a smile,
Then if you ever want a friend you needn’t try too hard,
You’ll always find one in the Irish boys that carried the hod.

A hod is a box with only three sides (imagine three walls of a cube that meet at a corner with the rest of the cube removed). Often mounted at the end of a stick, it is used to carry bricks or mortar during construction work. The image of Irish immigrant men as “hod carriers” was a recurring trope on the American music hall stage in the late 1800s and that’s where this song seems to have originated. However, the text above comes from Minnesota singer Michael Dean who, like other singers in the woods tradition, had a repertoire that freely mixed music hall songs with come-all-ye ballads and other song types. I have not come across “Two Irish Laborers” in any other collections so it may have been rare in tradition. Dean also sang “When McGuiness Gets a Job” which also references the hod (“he’s the boy that can juggle the old three-cornered box”). “McGuiness” originated on the stage and turns up in song collections from the Catskills and Prince Edward Island.

Thanks to some online newspaper archive sleuthing, I was able to connect “The Two Irish Laborers” to an influential 19^th century song and dance man named Dick Carroll. In April, 1924, The Brooklyn Standard Union ran a full page feature titled “Harking Back to the Good Old Days” in which one reader contributed this reminiscence: “In 1873, Dick Carroll, as the hod carrier, in his specialty of ‘Mortar and Bricks’ sang ‘Arrah, Pat be Quick Bring Up the Brick and the Mortar Too Likewise.’” According to Monarchs of Minstrelsy Carroll was born in New York City in 1832 and began performing publicly as a child before having a long career in minstrelsy and, later, the variety stage. He was known primarily as a dancer and Ryan’s Mammoth Collection even includes a tune called “Dick Carroll’s Clog.” “Mortar and Bricks” was his showpiece for many years.

With no luck finding a melody used by Dean or Carroll, I opted to borrow a melody sung by J. Molloy of St. Schott’s Newfoundland for another music hall song, “How Paddy Stole the Rope,” that has a similar opening line. Molloy’s unique and satisfying melody can be heard online via Memorial University’s fantastic digital collection “MacEdward Leach and the Songs of Atlantic Canada.”