{"id":100,"date":"2020-03-17T19:53:17","date_gmt":"2020-03-17T19:53:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/americanhistory\/?post_type=project&p=100"},"modified":"2020-04-28T00:20:56","modified_gmt":"2020-04-28T00:20:56","slug":"the-irish-american-sheet-music","status":"publish","type":"project","link":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/americanhistory\/project\/the-irish-american-sheet-music\/","title":{"rendered":"The Irish-American Sheet Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Irish American[1]<\/a>, piano sheet music is a\u00a01905\u00a0composition by George M. Cohan, a famous Irish Catholic American entertainer who became a pinnacle for\u00a0Catholic\u00a0Irish Americans\u00a0during an era of oppression. In many ways,\u00a0Cohan\u2019s contributions embraced widespread Irish American heritage and pride.\u00a0Through sound, the\u00a0piece\u00a0resonates\u00a0the\u00a0pure historical significance of the immigration of the Irish into the American lifestyle, and\u00a0highlights\u00a0how despite\u00a0all\u00a0their trials and tribulations, they\u00a0created and preserved a foundation\u00a0to continue to succeed\u00a0through\u00a0all forms of prejudice.<\/p>\n

George M. Cohan, (1878-1942), was a brilliant entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer and theatrical producer of Irish descent. His parents were travelling vaudeville actors, and they were known for the act \u201cThe Four Cohans\u201d, which starred himself, his sister, and his parents. To put his career into perspective, he starred in, created, and produced over 3 dozen Broadway musicals, wrote and produced over 50 televised shows, and successfully published over 300 songs. As an Irish American, his success was incredibly well known, as he set a benchmark not only for Irish Americans all throughout the country, but for anyone with a work ethic and drive to succeed, showing that with constant effort, stories like his are possible. He left an indelible imprint on the entertainment business, being dubbed \u201cthe father of American musical comedy\u201d, and also called \u201cthe man who owned Broadway.\u201d In addition to all the commemorations that have been issued in remembrance of Cohan\u2019s lifelong contributions to the Broadway and entertainment businesses respectively, the most notable one, a statue of Cohan in Times Square in New York City, can still be seen today.<\/p>\n

The Initial Irish immigrants, which would have been Cohan\u2019s parents, left a rural lifestyle in a nation\u00a0devoid of modernity. Many immigrants found themselves unprepared for the industrialized,\u00a0burgeoning urbanization that was widespread\u00a0in the United States.\u00a0However, that did not stop them\u00a0from\u00a0finding their inevitable success and reputation.\u00a0At the time, largely\u00a0poor and living in abject poverty, many\u00a0initial Irish immigrants left for a land they envisioned was full of promise, with no knowledge of what they were about to encounter.\u00a0Following the adverse effects of such events like the potato famine, they\u00a0often had zero dollars\u00a0when they left, only\u00a0the clothes on their backs and a fierce work ethic. Yet still they came in a multitude of waves, bringing as many as\u00a04.5 million\u202f Irish\u202f onto\u00a0American shores \u202fbetween\u00a0the years of\u00a01820\u00a0through\u00a01930.\u00a0During this time, the\u202f Irish\u202f represented just\u00a0over\u00a0a total third\u00a0of\u00a0the conglomerate of international\u00a0immigrants \u202fliving in the U.S.\u00a0However, they were not welcomed with open arms upon arrival. Considering the fact that the general American people\u00a0believed\u00a0that Ireland was a desolate disease-ridden land,\u00a0as\u202f Irish\u202f families moved into\u00a0local\u00a0neighborhoods,\u00a0previous tenants felt the desire to leave,\u00a0fearing\u00a0the\u00a0so called\u00a0unclean and unsanitary people and the diseases they brought with\u00a0them. In\u00a0turn, a host of social problems arose.<\/p>\n

Though the wave of Irish newcomers were not the only ethnic group to face a host of maltreatment,\u00a0they still faced substantial hostility from the American people into the early 19th<\/sup>\u00a0century.\u00a0Most\u00a0Irish were\u00a0Catholic and had been specifically treated with disdain by the American\u00a0Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who sought to differentiate themselves from any group of Catholic denomination.\u00a0As stated by Patrick McGrath[2]<\/a> in his article in the Journal of American Ethnic History<\/em>, entitled \u201cSecular Power, Sectarian Politics: The American-Born\u202f Irish\u202f Elite and Catholic Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century\u00a0New York,\u201d he stated\u00a0that \u201cmass immigration at midcentury, coupled with growing nativist persecution of the Catholic Church, forced these elites to navigate a middle ground between the secular world of New York politics and the rising sectarianism of the Irish immigrant community.\u201d\u00a0In turn, the Catholic subculture that was\u00a0beginning to emerge\u00a0was being built on the values and efforts of Irish born tenants, farmers, lawyers and politicians.<\/p>\n

This\u00a0Catholic subculture allowed for a platform that Irish Americans viewed as a feasible way to properly assimilate into the American society.\u00a0Specifically,\u00a0in densely populated areas such as New York, or Boston,\u00a0most of\u00a0the Catholic community was of Irish\u00a0descent. At this period in American Catholicism, with such a dominant Irish face, Catholicism became the most effective tool for Irish Americans to show the general American public exactly who they are, and not who they were thought to be. By as early as 1914, Catholicism became the most active and useful device for the Irish American people in terms of integration. Moreover, thanks to the proper and diligently guided leadership of Irish American Catholics, they no longer needed to adopt the defensive stance that early initial immigrants were forced to use. This new\u00a0fervent\u00a0wave of Irish\u00a0American Catholicism became the catalyst for leveling equality in\u00a0an\u00a0American society.\u00a0As stated in Elizabeth\u00a0McKillen\u2019s[3]<\/a>\u00a0essay in Diplomatic History<\/em> entitled \u201cEthnicity, class, and Wilsonian internationalism reconsidered: the Mexican-American and Irish-American immigrant Left and U.S. foreign relations\u201d, the devoutness displayed by Irish American Catholics\u00a0became viewed as a dynamic \u201carticulation of patriotism.\u201d\u00a0The culmination of Catholic Irish efforts as such are what became the breeding ground for famous stories and songs such as \u201cThe Irish American\u201d, by George M. Cohan, to be put in place to be a part of and inspire Irish American heritage and tradition.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> The Library of Congress, Notated Music, https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/item\/ihas.100001095\/<\/a>, accessed February 17, 2020.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Patrick McGrath, \u201cSecular Power, Sectarian Politics: The American-Born\u202fIrish\u202fElite and Catholic Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century\u00a0New York,\u201d Journal of American Ethnic History<\/em>, Vol. 38 Issue 3 (2019): 36.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Elizabeth Mckillen, \u201cEthnicity, class, and Wilsonian internationalism reconsidered: the Mexican-American and Irish-American immigrant Left and U.S. foreign relations,\u201d Diplomatic History<\/em>, Vol. 25 Issue 4 (2001): 533.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Irish American[1], piano sheet music is a\u00a01905\u00a0composition by George M. Cohan, a famous Irish Catholic American entertainer who became a pinnacle for\u00a0Catholic\u00a0Irish Americans\u00a0during an era of oppression. In many ways,\u00a0Cohan\u2019s contributions embraced widespread Irish American heritage and pride.\u00a0Through sound, the\u00a0piece\u00a0resonates\u00a0the\u00a0pure historical significance of the immigration of the Irish into the American lifestyle, and\u00a0highlights\u00a0how despite\u00a0all\u00a0their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4801,"featured_media":270,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"project_category":[8,19],"project_tag":[124,105,121,122,69,125,123],"class_list":["post-100","project","type-project","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","project_category-1900-1920","project_category-20th-century","project_tag-catholicism","project_tag-immigration","project_tag-irish-american","project_tag-music","project_tag-patriotism","project_tag-success","project_tag-work-ethic"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/americanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project\/100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/americanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/americanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/project"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/americanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4801"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/americanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/americanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project\/100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1838,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/americanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project\/100\/revisions\/1838"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/americanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/americanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"project_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/americanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project_category?post=100"},{"taxonomy":"project_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/americanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project_tag?post=100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}