Change and Stability in Irish-American-Newfoundland Fiddle Tunes Evelyn Osborne

studying culture in context Change and stability in Irish-American-Newfoundland fiddle tunes Evelyn Osborne Excerpted from: Ón gCos go Cluas From Dancing to Listening Fiddle and Dance Studies from around the North Atlantic 5 Edited by Liz Doherty and Fintan Vallely First published in 2019 by The Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, MacRobert Building, King’s College, Aberdeen, AB24 5UA ISBN: 978-1-85752-073-6 About the author: Evelyn Osborne completed her PhD in Ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2013; she holds a Bachelor of Music (Violin, University of Ottawa) and a MA in Canadian Studies (Carleton). Her research examines the construction of Newfoundland as an Irish musical place through media and the interactions of Irish and Newfoundland musicians since the mid-twentieth century. Osborne is a performer and teacher in St. John’s, NL and has given Newfoundland fiddle and dance workshops in Newfoundland, Labrador, Ontario, Singapore, and Australia. Her publications include CD liner notes, academic websites, and journal articles. Copyright © 2019 the Elphinstone Institute and the contributors. While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in the Elphinstone Institute, copyright in individual contributions remains with the contributors. The moral rights of the contributors to be identiﬁed as the authors of their work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. 27 Change and stability in Irish-American- Newfoundland fiddle tunes EVELYN OSBORNE The fiddle music in Newfoundland and Labrador is a confluence of music from Scotland, Britain, Ireland and France, with a wide variety of influences from Canada and the United States. This article considers the impact of one Irish-American vaudeville group from New York on the instrumental music of Newfoundland and Labrador – the McNulty Family, which was part of the thriving New York Irish scene from the 1920s until the 1960s. From 1944 until 1974, their music had a significant presence on the airwaves of Newfoundland through a radio show sponsored by a local clothing store. At this time, the Newfoundland traditional music recording industry was only just emerging and the McNulty’s popularity was part of the development of the Irish-Newfoundland music sound and recording repertoire. This study is based on newspaper, discography, archival and ethnographic research in both New York and Newfoundland.1 It investigates the McNultys’ influence on the repertoire of Newfoundland traditional recording artists from the 1950s to today in general, and, related to this, it compares stability and change in two instrumental tunes performed by the group. The McNulty family The band was comprised of mother Ann (1887–1970), daughter Eileen (1915–1989), and son Peter (1917–1960). Ann McNulty was born Ann Burke in Kilteeven, Roscommon, Ireland, in 1887. In 1910, at the age of 23 she emigrated to the United States where she married John McNulty (1887–1928), who died in 1928, leaving her with two young children. Resourceful and talented, Ann formed a family band which by the early 1930s had its own radio show, The Irish Showboat, and over the years between 1935 and 1951 a stage-show of the same name which sold out fifty-five times at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Opera Hall.2 Between 1936 and the late 1950s they recorded 155 titles on Decca, Standard, and Copley with re-issues on Colonial and Coral.3 Their music ranged from Irish songs which Ann recalled from childhood, through songs learned from older singers in New York, to Irish-American songs, vaudeville tunes, their own compositions, and instrumental music. In their stage shows the McNultys not only sang and danced but performed short skits. Their 222 OSBORNE Change and stability in Irish-American-Newfoundland fiddle tunes recordings focused on music, and these records were exported widely, including to Ireland and Newfoundland.4 The group’s career was centred on the New York City area, and in the summers they went to Rockaway Beach and the Catskills. There were infrequent tours to Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Isle.5 All three members danced. Ann ‘Ma’ McNulty played diatonic button accordion, daughter Eileen McNulty- Grogan sang and son Peter McNulty played fiddle; in 1953 the group toured Newfoundland for two months. Eileen returned to St. John’s in 1975 to appear on Ryan’s Fancy local CBC television show. Interestingly, when producer Jack Kellum was seeking Eileen for the show he was told that the McNultys were Newfoundlanders.6 During her visit she was interviewed by folklorist Pat Byrne in which she explained that when they started performing on stage ‘everything was rather relaxed’.7 Gradually, her mother’s philosophy on performing became quite formal. Ann sought to distinguish herself from the ‘party type’ or stereotyped stage Irish performer by wearing evening gowns and formal wear. As a group, however, they crossed boundaries, and Mick Maloney has categorised them as a hybrid group which dabbled in instrumental music, characterisations of Irishness on stage as well as performing nineteenth-century, Anglo-Irish songs.8 The McNultys had a long and successful career and were among the last Irish vaudevillians. The traditional music recording industry in Newfoundland Leach deemed Newfoundland an ‘ideal folk region’,9 and Karpeles came to the island seeking the ‘singing village’.10 Newfoundlanders have always had eclectic tastes in musics, including traditional music based in folksong and fiddle-music brought by fishermen and settlers from England, Scotland, Ireland, and France. Being an island on the east coast of North America has meant that various cultural and labour flows affected the overall repertoire. Music historian, Paul Woodford has charted the history of printed music on the island and details the plethora of string orchestras, brass bands, operas, and popular music which came there during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.11 One example of the variety of musics available is evident in the following advertisement for J. F. Chisholm in the 6 February 1864 edition of The Daybook, a St. John’s daily newspaper: Moore’s Irish Melodies; Handle’s [sic] Sacred Oratorio; The Messiah by Vincent Novello; The Golden Harp: Hymns Tunes and Choruses for Sabboth [sic] Schools; Melodian without a Master; and The Hibernia Collection 200 Irish Jiggs, Reels, Hornpipes, Songs, Dances Etcetera For the Violin, Flute, Cornet, Clarionett [sic].12 Broadsides from Tin Pan Alley were also popular, and local balladeer Johnny Burke (1851–1930) published several such sheets out of New York.13 In the 1920s and 1930s folksong collectors Elizabeth Greenleaf and Maud Karpeles both noted the Newfoundlanders’ penchant for singing popular music and jazz that they learnt from radio and recordings.14 It is important to keep in mind that Irish music came to Newfoundland not only from immigrants but also through Irish-American broadsides, tune books, recordings, and musical exchanges with travelling workers. 223 Ón gCos go Cluas – From Dancing to Listening The recording of folksong and traditional music in Newfoundland and Labrador didn’t commence until the middle of the twentieth century. Taft states that the first traditional music recording directed to a Newfoundland audience was Arthur Scammell’s 1943 Squid Jigging Ground, a private recording made through RCA in Montreal with financial backing of Gerald S. Doyle; Scammell estimated that he sold approximately fifteen to twenty thousand copies of this.15 Folksong releases have always been popular in Newfoundland; however, the recording market for instrumental music has been variable, with tunes usually occupying only a few tracks on a song-based album. In the mid-1950s a local recording industry started in earnest with the release of the first albums of folksongs and instrumental tunes by folksinger Omar Blondahl (1923–1993) and accordionist Wilf Doyle (1925–2012), in 1955 and 1956 respectively.16 Doyle’s was the first accordion album (in 1956), followed by another in 1958.17 Blondahl asked him to join in accompaniment on a few songs, and it was this combining of guitar, accordion, and folksongs which Rosenberg credits with starting the ‘sound’ which was picked up by accordionist Harry Hibbs in the 1960s and became another identifiable Newfoundland feature.18 The accordion Accordions are probably the most prominent instruments for playing dance music in the province, symbolised most dramatically by a 2005 Guinness Book of Records recognition for the ‘Largest Accordion Ensemble’ with 989 official participants,19 an event nicknamed locally ‘the accordion revolution’. Despite the accordion’s popularity, and its displacement of the fiddle as the historical solo dance instrument, the emic term ‘fiddler’ is still used to refer to a dance musician regardless of the type of instrument.20 Accordions first became available in Newfoundland in late 1844 or early 1845 and lessons were being offered by 1850.21 The melodeon (single-row button accordion) was played on the island until recently, the Hohner brand being the most popular, possibly due to the particular ‘Hohner sound’, but maybe a consequence of availability. The piano accordion has never become very popular in Newfoundland, suggesting that the early accordions too were also of the button type. That is the same general type of diatonic accordion which was used by Ma McNulty who played what Graeme Smith refers to as the ‘old’ or ‘pre-war melodeon’ style of Irish.22 This is in opposition to the ‘new’ chromatic button accordion which was adopted in Ireland in the mid-twentieth century23 and has only started being used in Newfoundland in the early twenty-first century starting with musicians who have travelled to Ireland.24 The so-called ‘old’ style of melodeon playing has stayed popular with Newfoundlanders.

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