An Irishman's Diary

EVERYBODY KNOWS Chicago was the birthplace of the blues. Less famous is the role it played, rehabilitative rather than obstetric, in saving another musical vernacular: Irish traditional. In fact, much of the saving was done by one man, and he was from Cork. But the same Chicago police force that gave him his title – “Chief O’Neill” – also served, under him, as a kind-of intensive care unit for the music he loved, then facing extinction.

For a few years either side of 1900, any Irish musician who fetched up in the Windy City and came to O’Neill’s attention – as few did not – was wont to end up in uniform. It was an odd arrangement. Back home, relations between musicians and the law were at best indifferent and at worst strained, like those between The Peeler and the Goat.

But it seems to have worked. With O’Neill in charge, the Chicago police department had one of its more glorious eras. His early initiatives included a crackdown on fraudulent travel claims by his own officers, who had long enjoyed a nice little earner from expenses incurred supposedly pursuing criminals across state lines. This was in keeping with his attitude. In a famously corrupt city, he once even arrested an alderman and somehow survived.

Even so, police work was only the secondary passion of his life. The first had been sparked by a rural childhood near Bantry, half a century earlier, where he grew up surrounded by music and dance, performed indoors during winter and at the crossroads in summer. Even then, he later recalled, it was a culture in decline, its end seemingly hastened by the cataclysm just past.

The future Chief was born Daniel (aka Francis) O’Neill in August 1848, a month after the skirmish in Widow McCormack’s cabbage patch, when Ireland’s fortunes had reached an all-time low.

He was mercifully oblivious at the time. In a memoir late in life, he recalled childhood in a slightly less unhappy Ireland where neighbours visited nightly “to learn the news from the Crimean War”, read by his father in the illumination of “tallow candles and dogwood splinters”, while “crowded out from the candles, I contrived to study . . . by the fitful light of the turf fire.” His studies made him ambitious to travel. At 16 he left Ireland for a short maritime career, which nearly ended with a shipwreck in the Pacific. The experience taught him the value of music, if he didn’t know already. Stranded for a month on a ship with dwindling rations, he was given extra food by an admirer of his flute playing, and thus was one of the few on board not suffering from malnutrition when the vessel finally arrived safe in Honolulu.

In 1873, married and 25, he joined the Chicago police and was hardly in the job when shot by a burglar. For the rest of his life, he carried a bullet in his back, too near his spine for removal. But he was also promoted for bravery, and so began his climb to the top of the force.

Like all good policemen, O’Neill had a talent for listening, and applied it obsessively to music. Everywhere he went his ear was cocked for Irish songs and tunes, although having no formal training, he could only record them in memory. Luckily for posterity, he soon found an accomplice in a namesake, James O’Neill, who shared his passion and, crucially, had a talent for transcribing what he heard.

Another police recruit, the latter O'Neill helped the former to compile the vast catalogue of tunes he would eventually commit to publication. By the end of his life, the Chief had collected about 3,500, some centuries-old, many found nowhere else. It was, according to Nicholas Carolan, author of a book on O'Neill called A Saved Harvest, "the largest snapshot ever taken of Irish traditional music".

O’Neill’s personal life was tragic. Six of his 10 children died in infancy, two (from diphtheria) on the same day. After burying the last of his sons, he vowed that no more music would be played in the family home, long an open house for instrumentalists.

But the other sad thing about his life is that by its end, in 1936, he believed all his work to have been in vain. The Irish emigrants he hoped the music would appeal to were more interested in becoming American than in forging links with the old country. And as for the old country, it would be three decades more before a revival took hold there.

The defeatism was evident in his comment, late in life, that “Traditional Irish music could have survived even the Famine if it had not been capriciously and arbitrarily proscribed and suppressed.” His targets here were not just the former English rulers of Ireland, but the Catholic Church too.

A friend not given to religious belief told me recently that she hoped there was an afterlife partly so that people like O’Neill might realise his heroic work had not been futile. And if, by chance, the ex-chief is watching somewhere, he will know by now that he was vindicated; that when events like the Willie Clancy Summer School showcase his beloved music every year, they draw virtuoso instrumentalists from every corner of the Irish world, Chicago included.

He will also have known the line-up for this year’s Jim Larkin Hedge School even before it was announced last night in Liberty Hall.

But as the rest of us now know, the event – organised by the Clé Club of singers and musicians – begins on June 11th with a tribute to O’Neill, by Nicholas Carolan, aptly titled “Hail to the Chief”. The weekend will also feature music, dancing, workshops, and other entertainments. Further details are at www.cleclub.wetpaint.com

• fmcnally@irishtimes.com