Andy Barclay explores the music hall world of Joyce's Dublin
The streets were alive with the sounds of music. Errand boys whistling; jingling of harnesses; sheet-music sellers belting out their wares; brass bands oom-pah-pahing all the way up to the Castle; beggars singing with outstretched palms; barrel organs giving "rollicking rattling" songs of the music halls.
Joyce refers many a time to the phenomenon of 1900s Dublin that was the music hall: the songs, the singers and the images the halls carried. In 'The Boarding House' in Dubliners, there were artistes from the music halls at Mrs Mooney's, and her daughter, Polly, would sing: "I'm a . . . naughty girl. You needn't sham: you know I am".
For the halls had a reputation that Leopold Bloom reflects upon when he reads daughter Milly's letter in Ulysses. Milly was 15, earning 12/6d a week. Yet Bloom reckoned she might do worse, like take up with a young student ("when he took her off to Birmingham, he took away my soul"), or go on the music hall stage.
In 'Counterparts' in Dubliners, Farrington in Mulligan's back parlour eyes a woman "out of the Tivoli", with her peacock-blue scarf, her yellow, elbow-length gloves, and plump arms which she moved very often and with much grace. In nighttown, of course, Bloom reflects on "the throng penned tight in the old Royal stairs, for they love crushes, instinct of the herd, and the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles vice".
Louis MacNeice in 'Death of an Actress' knew that music hall audience: " . . . an audience come from slum and suburb and weary of the tea leaves in the sink", where the actress, music hall singer Florrie Forde "for more than forty years was giving sexual sentimental or comic entertainment, A gaudy posy for the popular soul".
Forde - an Australian whose real name was Flanagan - was the star of summer shows on the Isle of Man before 1914, and made Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly? the hit it was. And here's where Joyce got mixed up more than somewhat, for the Berkeley Street "rollicking rattling streetorgan" could not have played "Kelly: kay ee double ell wy" because the song was not published until 1909.
Blazes Boylan steps in tan shoes and socks with skyblue clocks by the provost's wall to a refrain from My Girl's A Yorkshire Girl. Again, in nighttown, a pianola plays the prelude to that song.
Whoops.Yorkshire Girl was first published in 1908.
There's a string of references in Ulysses to stars of the music hall as Bloom and company move through the city: Pat Kinsella, Eugene Stratton, Marie Kendall, "The White-eyed Kaffir" Chirgwin, the Bohee brothers, the Two Macs and their song The Wild Man of Borneo Has Just Come to Town.
Pat Kinsella was the only native Irish act, although John McNally of the Two Macs was Dublin born. Kinsella was "Dublin's Own", and a particular favourite at Dan Lowrey's Star of Erin music hall, which ran from 1879 to 1897 at Crampton Court, Dame Street, until it reopened under new management as the Empire Palace, and is now the Olympia.
Kinsella, wrote Eugene Watters in his brilliant Infinite Variety (Gill and Macmillan, 1975), was "plump, light as a feather on his feet, rosy cheeked with a shock of chestnut hair" and "knew the temper of the Dublin street: quick, humorous and cynical. His solos, sung with gusto, burlesqued alike the marching Red Military and the dream of the Green Men marching and got home to the hearts of the Pit and Gallery with the extravagant verve of The Ballybough Brigade, The Mud Island Fusiliers, or Ballyhooley." Those three songs were written by Robert Martin of Galway, landowner, JP, Unionist and boulevardier, whose songwriting fame made him known as "Ballyhooley Bob".
There's an uneasy feel to Joyce's remarks about Eugene Stratton and the Bohee Brothers, something coarsely sexual. Stratton's was a blacked-up act: burnt cork on the face, banjos plucked, songs of the black South and the plantation. He was the king of the "coon" song: " Why it's John James Ebenezer Hezekiah Peter Hennery Zachary John James Brown! Don't you know me? - Garn! yuh will very soon For I'm John James Brown the Dandy Coloured Coon!" Stratton posters were up around the town in 1904: "From the hoardings Mr Eugene Stratton grinned with thick nigger lips . . ." When he gets his wanderers to nighttown, Joyce evokes Stratton again, and the Bohee Brothers, who were black singers, not just blacked up.
The "coon" songs were all the rage in 1904: just the year before the American songwriting team of Jerome and Schwarz had produced Bedelia: The Irish Coon-Song Serenade, which started off: "There's a charming Irish lady with a roguish winning way, Who has kept my heart a bumpin' and a jumpin' night and day, She's a flower from Killarney with a Tipperary smile, She's the best that ever came from Erin's isle."
And the chorus began "Bedelia, I want to steal ye . . . " only the boys on the street were soon yelling "Bedelia, I want to feel ye . . ." Joyce wrote of the Bohee Brothers in the nighttown sequence: "Tom and Sam Bohee, coloured coons in white duck suits". He picks out their scarlet socks, their high starched "Sambo" collars and scarlet flowers in their buttonholes. Both strum on banjos, jingling the "twingtwang" strings. They flash "white Kaffir eyes and tusks". Then "clucking, chortling, trumming, twanging they diddle diddle cakewalk dance away".
Tusks! Watters remarks: "All over Dublin boys were playing imaginary banjos with their fingernails and shuffling in the off-beat two-pulse". Air guitars, how are ye.
Marie Kendall's poster is spotted by Miss Dunne in Ulysses: "charming soubrette . . . mustard hair and dauby cheeks. She's not nice looking, is she? The way she is holding up her bit of a skirt".
Kendall was a Cockney, a very fine low comedienne, with songs like If I Could See This For 1s 6d What Could I See For A Quid?, Johnny Without His Trousers, My Old Man Is One Of The Boys And I Am One Of The Girls, and Did Your First Wife Ever Do That? She characterised her act as "plain honest vulgarity".
It was the Moore and Burgess Minstrels, the greatest of the minstrel group acts in the later 19th century, who used the phrase "Fun without vulgarity" on their posters, keen to attract respectable audiences.
By 1904 the more risque acts were still about, but the bigger halls had made big investments, and wanted to widen their appeal. Joyce uses the phrase after the Citizen's final growls: "Our two inimitable drolls did a roaring trade with their broadsheets among lovers of the comedy element and nobody who has a corner in his heart for real Irish fun without vulgarity will grudge them their hardearned pennies".
It's the Citizen, too, who refers to Bloom as "that whiteyed kaffir', which was the name the blacked-up Chirgwin gave himself. He took to the stage with a diamond-shape of white around his right eye, and had a voice which ran from a tremulous falsetto to deepest bass.
George Gamble wrote of Chirgwin in 1899: "He can play his violin like a proverbial angel, and can extract humour from articles so unpromising as clay pipes. His audience greet him with uproarious welcome, and bid him farewell with uproarious regret".
Chirgwin would have his listeners reduced to tears, then look up and chirp: "Could do wiv a drink".
Joyce's allusions to song in Ulysses are not all of 1904: again in nighttown Virag says: "Fleshpots of Egypt to hanker after. Wallow in it . . . Slapbang! There he goes again". And Slap Bang! Here We Go Again! was a favourite song of the Great Vance, the Lion Comique, published in 1865. Vance last appeared in Lowrey's Star of Erin in 1887: a decade before he had taken his own company on a tour of Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Kilkenny.
The elegaic note that Joyce used about Pat Kinsella was true to that fine comedian's life. "Broth of a boy," wrote Joyce, "Dion Boucicault business with his harvestmoon face in a poky bonnet . . . How time flies, eh? More Power, Pat . . . where is he now? Beggar somewhere. The harp that once did starve us all."
And fade away Kinsella did. He owned the small Harp Theatre until 1893, when he let business affairs slide after his son died. He played Conn in Boucicault's The Shaughraun in the 1890s. He played smaller and smaller venues. A newspaper of 1906 reported his death in Liverpool: "Success did not exactly smile on him".
The sounds of those days of the halls can still be heard: some of the later stars recorded their songs and their odd bellows and warblings come through the hisses and crackles.
Mark Sheridan you can hear with I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside, which echoes that moment of Bloom's on Sandymount Strand as Gerty McDowell moves away: "Those girls, those girls, those lovely seaside girls . . . "
Andy Barclay is currently working on a book entitled Along The Way to Tipperary: The Irish in Popular Song from the Great Famine to the Great War