Identity, Nationalism, and Irish Traditional Music in Chicago, 1867–1900

Abstract

On the evening of October 8,1871, the family of fiddler Pat McLaughlin and his wife gathered for a celebration at 137 De Koven Street. The cousin of McLaugh lin's wife had just arrived from Ireland, coming to the United States for the first time. McLaughlin cheerfully provided his instrument to initiate a party that he hoped none would forget, playing music for a dance held in his visiting relative's honor. As it happened, the occasion proved a memorable event, but not because the guests danced exuberantly to the strains of melodies culled from home. The dance was instead interrupted by massive walls of flame at around nine o'clock that night. Chicago's Great Fire of 1871, which destroyed two-thirds of the starting with McLauglin's street, cut the festivities short. McLaughlin's neigh borhood was not merely leveled by the blaze, but was in fact the initial site of the Great Fire's combustion.1 McLaughlin's dance encapsulates two contending forces in the lives of Irish traditional musicians. One was the desire to transplant the art of tradi tional music brought from their home country through continued perfor mance in Chicago. A force was the reality of overwhelming social change. Life in the urban United States was not the same as existence in rural Ireland, where a devastating citywide inferno would have been unthinkable. While traditional musicians in Ireland could usually count on an audience, as practitioners in the second city often found it difficult to attract attention, the majority of the Irish in Chicago were uninterested, or only casually inter ested, in traditional arts. Most of the city's Irish population advocated assim ilation through the creation of a new ethnic American identity that was based on Catholicism, nationalism, and invented celebrations of Irish heritage?