{"id":570,"date":"2016-03-17T07:00:19","date_gmt":"2016-03-17T11:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=570"},"modified":"2017-01-24T08:27:48","modified_gmt":"2017-01-24T13:27:48","slug":"pat-works-on-the-railway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/pat-works-on-the-railway\/","title":{"rendered":"Pat Works on the Railway (Irish minstrelsy)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Pat Works on the Railway\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Pr3RnQJ0q9Y?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Yet another I learned from Cisco Houston, recalling the waves of Irish laborers who immigrated to the United States in the nineteenth century and built most of the eastern rail system<img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-663\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/railway-worker-206x300.jpg?resize=206%2C300\" alt=\"railway worker\" width=\"206\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/railway-worker.jpg?resize=206%2C300&amp;ssl=1 206w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/railway-worker.jpg?w=236&amp;ssl=1 236w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 206px) 100vw, 206px\" \/> &#8212;\u00a0 while the western rail lines were built mostly by Chinese immigrants.<\/p>\n<p>The stereotype of the harried but cheerful Irish workingman was already an English theatrical staple in Shakespeare&#8217;s time, and this song wanders the permeable boundary between folk and pop music. In <em>Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong<\/em>, Norm and <span class=\"addmd\">David Cohen write that &#8220;it is not certain whether it originated among Irish laborers or among Irish professional entertainers.&#8221; Nor is it certain what &#8220;it&#8221; means, since the song is vaguely dated to the 1850s and already existed in numerous variants by the late 1800s. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"addmd\">The earliest documented version seems to have been a sea chantey, which didn&#8217;t have the pseudo-Gaelic &#8220;fillamee-ooree-airee-ay&#8221; chorus. The version that is currently best known in Ireland &#8212; due largely to the Dubliners &#8212; has yet another chorus about &#8220;wearing corduroy britches, digging ditches.&#8221; Some folklorists have rejected all versions as minstrel show confections, and I&#8217;d bet aces to oranges that the Dubliners&#8217; version is stage-Irish, but I&#8217;d guess Cisco&#8217;s had made its way into oral tradition by the time he got it.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p>The song is often titled &#8220;Paddy&#8221; rather than &#8220;Pat,&#8221; and both wer<img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-579 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/irish-chinese-immigration.jpg?resize=357%2C243\" alt=\"irish-chinese immigration\" width=\"357\" height=\"243\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/irish-chinese-immigration.jpg?w=406&amp;ssl=1 406w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/irish-chinese-immigration.jpg?resize=300%2C204&amp;ssl=1 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 357px) 100vw, 357px\" \/>e generic names for Irish characters back in the days when comic Irish minstrelsy was almost as common as comic blackface minstrelsy &#8212; some recent scholars have proposed the term &#8220;greenface.&#8221; The overlaps between Irish and black stereotypes are well worth exploring, but can easily be overstated, since most stage Irishmen were in fact Irish, while most stage Negros were white (frequently Irish) performers in blackface make-up. (There were plenty of fake Irish as well, including Harpo Marx, whose red wig was a survival of his original stage character, an Irish Patsy Brannigan.)<\/p>\n<p>I guess that&#8217;s my excuse for digging this one out &#8212; along with the fact that these songs survived in oral tradition among Irish singers, often as expressions of working-class pride. Another song Cisco recorded, &#8220;Drill, Ye Tarriers,&#8221; has a great pair of verses about an Irish laborer facing particularly harsh labor conditions:<\/p>\n<p>Our new foreman was Jim McGann,<br \/>\nBy golly, he was a blame mean man.<br \/>\nOne day a premature blast went off<br \/>\nAnd a mile in the sky went Big Jim Goff.<br \/>\nDrill, ye tarriers, drill.<\/p>\n<p>When next payday come around,<br \/>\nJim Goff a dollar short was found,<br \/>\nWhen he asked the reason, got this reply:<br \/>\n&#8220;You were docked for the time you were up in the sky.&#8221;<br \/>\nDrill, ye tarriers, drill.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another from Cisco Houston, recalling the waves of Irish laborers who built most of the US railroad system and the stereotypes of &#8220;greenface minstrelsy.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.8 - 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I assumed I'd got it from the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, who were favorites of mine, but they don't seem to have done it, and the only version I can find of it in\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"whiskey in the jar broadside","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/whiskey-in-the-jar-broadside.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":42,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/sunday-street\/","url_meta":{"origin":570,"position":2},"title":"Sunday Street (Dave Van Ronk)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"December 12, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Dave Van Ronk was a close friend, mentor, and kind of a second father to me--aside from guitar, he taught me about literature, history, politics, food, jazz, the ins and outs of New York, and the vagaries of the music business. When I was studying with him in 1976-77, he\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Sunday Street","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/Sunday-Street.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":30,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/the-sheik-of-araby\/","url_meta":{"origin":570,"position":3},"title":"Sheik of Araby (My father and ethnicity)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"December 11, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"This is one of the first songs I ever learned, thanks to my father, who was born in 1906 and seemed to know just about every pop song of his youth. He frequently sang at the dinner table, and this was one of his favorites, along with \"Lena was the\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2083,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/michigan-water\/","url_meta":{"origin":570,"position":4},"title":"Michigan Water (ironies of the Great Migration)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"October 8, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"This year's award for the most glaring irony in American folklore goes to the title line of this song: \"Michigan water tastes like sherry wine.\" Jelly Roll Morton's lyric metaphorically summed up the central dream of the \"great migration\" -- that black Americans could escape bad times down south for\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"jelly roll morton commodore","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/jelly-roll-morton-commodore-300x295.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":739,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/rye-whiskey\/","url_meta":{"origin":570,"position":5},"title":"Rye Whiskey","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"April 1, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm pretty sure I learned this from Pete Seeger's American Favorite Ballads songbook, which has it on page 69, accompanied by a couple of\u00a0 drawings of stereotyped hillbillies and the note, \"A famous late-at-night howler.\" Seeger lists his source as John Lomax's Cowboy Songs, which is apparently the first documented\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"American Favorite ballads","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/American-Favorite-ballads-202x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=570"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2439,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570\/revisions\/2439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}