CURIOSITIES:IRISH-AMERICAN CULTURE came up with some very odd and curious ditties indeed, and in the wake of Barack Obama's melting-pot speech and the sight of St Patrick's Day parades in the US - any colour so long as it's green - we were tempted to trawl looked through my collection of sheet music for some "ethnic stew" songs appropriate to the season, writes ANDY BARCLAY
In the 1890s and 1900s, the old knock-about Paddy songs were being superseded by "novelty" songs. As William HA Williams wrote in Twas Only an Irishman's Dream(1996), these embraced "the new, the improbable, the eccentric, the nonsensical and the unexpected".
Then came the vogue for wacky ethnic combinations. Arrah Wanna (An Irish Indian Matrimonial Adventure)of 1906 coupled a top-hatted Paddy with a feather-wearing squaw. It was a hit, so writers Jack Drislane and Theodore Moore jumped on their own bandwagon with Since Arrah Wanna Married Barney Carney, which had these lyrics to grimace by: "On the plains and prairies gay the Shamrock now is seen/ The tom-toms play The Wearing of the Green."
There was also the Hiberno-Hawaiian offering of O'Brien is Tryin' to Learn to Talk Hawaiianof 1916, which has the immortal chorus "With his 'Arrah Yaka Hula Begorra Hicki Dula'/And his Irish 'Jiji Boo'/ Sure O'Brien is tryin' to talk Hawaiian/To his Honolulu Lou." It brought down the house, apparently.
Where do you find this stuff? Second-hand booksellers, of course, and on Ebay you can spend €10 for a batch of five old Tin Alley songs or up to €1,000 for a classic piece of artwork in mint condition.