Irish traditional music is a generalized term applied to a multifaceted assortment of international musical communities, each with its own set of standards and practices for the making and transmission of the music. A few elements, however, unite these diverse communities. One of the most important of them is the extensive shared repertoire contained in the Francis O'Neill collections of Irish dance music. The Music of Ireland (1903) and the later The Dance Music of Ireland (1907) comprise source material so important to the Irish traditional musician that the latter is often referred to as “The Bible,” or merely “The Book.” The versions of tunes that appear in the O'Neill collections are often assumed to be authoritative—so much so that different versions of the tunes, no matter their provenance, may be considered either variants or derivatives of “the real thing” as presented in these collections.

The O'Neill collections represent stunning achievements for a number of reasons. First and foremost, they appear at the end of a solid century distinguished by the avid collection of Irish songs and instrumental music. Collecting folk music, especially if the music is viewed as an essential aspect of a national identity, is a uniquely nineteenth-century Romantic enterprise.Footnote ¹ Nation building through identification of a unique body of indigenous music occurred throughout Europe, but nowhere with greater avidity than in Ireland, Scotland, and England. Some of the collections that resulted from these efforts were published in Ireland and England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (most notably the several volumes notated by Edward Bunting and the enormous collection of George Petrie), some were not published until recently, and others remain in manuscript form. Collecting was prompted not only by an impulse to define what was uniquely Irish in the popular music of the time, but also by the conviction that the music would be lost with its contemporary practitioners if it were not notated and cataloged.Footnote ² Edward Bunting, who collected music from the ancient harpers invited to the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792, had reason to believe that much of the music heard and celebrated at that festival might be lost to posterity. This conviction was a critical impetus to his collecting activity that resulted in three separate volumes of Irish music, published from 1798 to 1840. Later collectors, such as George Petrie and Patrick Weston Joyce, were also convinced that the ancient and lovely music of Ireland would be lost if it were not collected from its practitioners and notated. They had reason, as well, to believe that the Great Famine forever changed the practice of traditional music in Ireland. Much of the collecting activity of the nineteenth century (including that of Bunting, Joyce, and Petrie), however, focused on song and song airs. Francis O'Neill was truly the first to attempt a collection of Irish dance music. Although earlier published collections in Ireland (O'Farrell) and in the United States (Ryan's Mammoth Collection) contained numerous Irish tunes for dancing, neither was conceived as a record of Irish music and musical practice. O'Neill, in his systematic exclusion of any tune he did not identify as Irish, is therefore properly placed with the earlier nineteenth-century Irish collectors, both in their scope and in their creation of a body of music accepted as Irish. On the other hand, O'Neill did include tunes of other origins—mostly Scottish—in his final book, Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melody (1922). Francis O'Neill was himself convinced of the need to collect the music of Ireland, and also feared that the music might not survive his efforts. His collections are therefore inclusive in that they assemble a huge number of dance tunes, song airs, and semiclassical harp compositions; they are also notably exclusive of any composition or tune form that he did not identify as Irish. The definition of a dance tune as of Irish origin was an occupation dear to O'Neill. His judgment was built not only on the national feeling of the proud emigrant, but also on a fine ear and a superb sensitivity to what his contemporaries were playing and claiming as Irish.

Second, the O'Neill collections remain important because they chronicle the music preserved and played in an Irish emigrant community at the turn of the twentieth century. Music is a cultural heritage that travels easily; every emigrant musician can transport a personal repertoire that—like as not—is cached in the player's memory rather than notated on the page. Musical memories are nurtured not only by repetition of learned melodies, but also by encounters with new tunes and styles of play. A traditional musician in the melting pot of turn-of-the-century Chicago could not fail to hear musical forms that were new and different and exciting in their possibilities. Despite Francis O'Neill's efforts to produce a tunebook comprising Irish melodies alone, his collections are instead reflective of a tradition that grew by assimilation of influences from its new environment.

As a consequence of his passionate collecting activity, every Irish traditional musician in North America knows the name and the accomplishments of Francis O'Neill. His work is regarded as one of the great foundations of Irish music in the United States. His musical collections represent the most comprehensive compilation of Irish music as played by Irish and Irish American musicians ever assembled. They were unsurpassed in scope until the massive Breandán Breathnach Ceol Rince na hÉireann of the 1980s and possess an inclusiveness and an individual voice that is perhaps unmatched even today. There have been attempts to render the O'Neill collections closer to the assumed taste of traditional musicians in the United States,Footnote ³ but most Irish traditional musicians view them today as the primary authority for the naming of tunes, for tasteful and correct settings of the melodies, and for constructing medleys and bolstering personal repertoires.

The accomplishments of Francis O'Neill in collecting and preserving the dance music heritage of Ireland in the emigrant communities of the United States is rendered even more impressive when one considers that most of his professional life was spent serving the city of Chicago as policeman, police captain, and chief of police. He also amassed an enormous personal library of books associated with Ireland, now the Francis O'Neill Archive at the University of Notre Dame.

The year 2003 marked the centenary of the publication of Francis O'Neill's Music of Ireland; the year 2007 was the centenary of O'Neill's The Dance Music of Ireland: 1001 Gems. Given the near-legendary status of his personal story and the enormous esteem in which his collections are held, it seems remarkable that these dates should have passed with little or no official recognition by the huge and diverse community of Irish traditional musicians throughout the world. It is, however, perhaps a more appropriate tribute to this most bookish of icons of Irish traditional music to note that three books about Francis O'Neill and his work have been published in the past decade: Nicholas Carolan's 1997 biography, A Harvest Saved: Francis O'Neill and Irish Music in Chicago; Caoimhin Mac Aoidh's 2006 work on Irish music in Chicago, The Scribe: The Life and Works of James O'Neill; and Francis O'Neill's own memoirs, Chief O'Neill's Sketchy Recollections of an Eventful Life in Chicago (Reference O'Neill, Skerrett and Lesch2008).Footnote ⁴ These three works form the subject of the present essay. These publications, as a whole, might be viewed as a true marker of the centenary of the collections' release. More important, they also serve as a means of approaching Francis O'Neill the man, without diminishing the magnitude of his musical achievements.

It is not as if O'Neill left us no glimpse of himself in his musical collections; his selections, his taste in tunes, and his appropriation of them as “Irish” (that is, to his ear not Irish American, Scottish, or from U.S. or Canadian sources) all say much about the shape of his musical world and his pride in his heritage. A case in point is the reel “Peter Street.” O'Neill's assessment of the Irish origin of tunes is uncannily accurate, even if he did not possess all the information that modern research affords. In Irish Folk Music, for example, he describes his conviction that “Peter Street,” a reel contributed by James O'Neill to the Music of Ireland, is of Irish origin despite its being “found in most American piano publications.” He first states that the tune may be found under another name, “Miller's Frolics,” in “Howe's collections, printed in Boston,” but finds an earlier instance of its publication, as “Sweet Peter Street,” in the Clinton Gems of Ireland, dated 1841. This finding, he is confident, establishes the tune as of Irish origin, even though it is “by no means a characteristic Irish reel.”Footnote ⁵

The fuller story is even more circuitous. The tune is often known today as “Timour the Tartar” and is associated with a popular melodrama of the same name written in England, and first performed at Covent Garden on 11 April 1811. Its U.S. debut was in Philadelphia in 1813. Although the music for the melodrama was attributed to one Matthew P. King, it may have at least in part comprised popular melodies of the time. One tune from the play, called “Timour the Tartar,” quickly shows up in a collection of popular dance music published in Albany, New York, circa 1828–31. It shows up even earlier, as an untitled reel, in an American tune manuscript collection from Woburn, Massachusetts, begun in 1807. Aloys Fleischmann, in his Sources of Irish Traditional Music, does identify “Sweet Peter Street” from the Clinton collection as the same tune as the James O'Neill “Peter Street,” but also identifies the tune in the second volume of the Hime collection (1809) as “A Tune Danced at Peter Street.” (The “Peter Street” referred to here is presumably the Dublin street, as the Hime collection was published in Dublin; but there also were Peter Streets in a number of British, Canadian, and U.S. cites at the time.) O'Neill may have seen the tune as “Miller's Frolics” in Howe's Musician's Omnibus (the first volume, dated 1861); it also appears as “McGregor's Reel” in Howe's Second Part of the Musician's Companion from 1844, and in his The Caledonia Collection from 1860. The reel is not, as O'Neill asserts, “a tune without a history,” and he may well have been correct in claiming it as Irish. Another interesting thing about the reel is that the Hime version is in C major, and the Clinton version is in D major. A version published in sheet music form in London and Dublin (1816) is in A major, and another published in Glasgow (1814) is in B-flat major. By the time the tune reached the United States, it had been transposed into G (the Steele collection from Albany, and the manuscript from Woburn) and again into A major (the Caledonia, William Bradbury Ryan's Mammoth Collection version, published in Boston in 1883, and O'Neill's). The O'Neill version resembles the Ryan version most closely.Footnote ⁶

“Peter Street” is a reel played and enjoyed today in musical communities in Ireland, Scotland, and North America. As Francis O'Neill noted, it does not sound particularly Irish, but O'Neill was apparently able to discern its heritage nonetheless. That O'Neill was most probably correct about the tune's provenance speaks not only to his exquisite ear for the music, but also to the importance he placed on the Irish heritage of the music he played and collected.

O'Neill also took pains to leave posterity with a record of his musical contemporaries; his Irish Folk Music: A Fascinating Hobby (1910) and Irish Minstrels and Musicians (1913) are voluminous, although very readable, accounts of his enduring obsession with the music and of the lives and accomplishments of his musical partners. Much of the former publication is devoted to O'Neill's views on the provenance of various tunes, and on the proper playing of them. Of interest, for example, to those contemporary Irish musicians who assume that reels should be played at a very fast tempo is O'Neill's strict admonition to play the well-known reel “The Woman of the House” at a pace no “faster than marching time.”Footnote ⁷

A Harvest Saved: Nicholas Carolan's Biography

Despite all that Francis O'Neill offered to future generations in his collections and in his observations of the music and its practitioners, he did not view himself as a formative influence or even as an enduring figure in the world of Irish music. He despaired in his later years that knowledge of the traditional music of Ireland would not long outlive him, because of its rejection by Irish on both sides of the Atlantic. He wrote to his friend, Fr. Séamus O'Floinn, in 1918,

Subsequent generations of traditional Irish musicians have thought quite differently, of course, and have accorded Francis O'Neill and his work a unique place in the history of Irish music. Irish music's debt to O'Neill is carefully delineated by Nicholas Carolan, himself one of the foremost voices in Irish music studies today. A learned and indefatigable scholar of the music, Carolan is also the director of the Irish Traditional Music Archive in Dublin. A Harvest Saved is, at first reading, straightforward biography. Carolan takes care to set forth a remarkable—and remarkably adventurous—life with a maximum of verbal and visual illustration and a minimum of extraneous commentary. He limns the difficulties of policing one of the most violent communities in North America, for example, by means of a photograph depicting Chicago police walking a beat amid a teeming street market, set beside a drawing of the Levee red-light district. The latter features a fast-food cart emblazoned with the legend “Eat A Pork Chop and Be Happy.” Carolan deftly contrasts this cheery slogan with the grim realities of the working life of a policeman. The copious illustrations carry a good portion of the narrative of this short, but masterful, recounting of the life of a remarkable Irish American who happened to be devoted to the traditional music of his homeland.

The subtext of A Harvest Saved is far more subtle, but clearly indicated by the title. Francis O'Neill, Carolan asserts, must be recognized as no less than a savior of traditional Irish music. O'Neill's efforts in promoting and collecting the music resulted in not only the most comprehensive collections of Irish music to that date, but also a renewed appreciation for the music among Irish Americans in the city of Chicago. By the 1890s, Carolan writes,

Carolan also does not shrink from identifying an important source of inspiration for the Chief—the polyglot community O'Neill served and resided in:

Carolan's decision to study the life and legacy of Francis O'Neill is in itself a strong endorsement of the importance of the police chief's work to the current practice of Irish traditional music. It is also a detailed statement of gratitude, a thank-you note from this generation of traditional musicians and scholars to an illustrious forebear. Nowhere in A Harvest Saved is this last purpose made more patent than in the last section of the book, titled “Legacy”: “The influence of Francis O'Neill's published collections is difficult to trace in detail, but [it has] been pervasive in the playing of Irish traditional dance music throughout the twentieth century. Their very existence [the collections] has been a source of national pride for many in Ireland and in Irish America, not only musicians, and has greatly enhanced the status of traditional dance music in the eyes of its practitioners and its audiences.”Footnote ¹¹

This kind of statement underscores Carolan's characterization of O'Neill, in the introduction to A Harvest Saved, as “an outstanding figure of the Irish diaspora.”Footnote ¹² O'Neill's achievement, according to Carolan, was notable not only for the promotion and preservation of Irish American traditional music, but also as a cornerstone of Irish culture. Carolan's assertion that Ireland must claim O'Neill's work as an important part of its musical heritage would have been enthusiastically supported by O'Neill himself,Footnote ¹³ although there were those in Ireland during the first half of the twentieth century who would have disagreed. The reception of The Dance Music of Ireland in Ireland was generally very supportive, although there were those who viewed O'Neill, by virtue of his U.S. tenancy, as less than authentically Irish—and his transcriptions, by extension, as a flawed record of a uniquely Irish achievement. Francis O'Neill himself was both amused and dismayed by his Irish distracters. He saw, rightly, that he was being criticized by those who could neither replicate his achievement nor completely grasp its importance. He also saw an element of misplaced nationalism implicit in this criticism, as well as a certain snobbishness directed toward the emigrant. “Why bless his simple soul!” O'Neill writes about one of his most vocal critics, the Rev. Edward Gaynor (whom he declines to name). “What could have led him to imagine that Watergrass Hill (where Gaynor resided) had a monopoly on the traditional atmosphere of County Cork, not to mention the rest of Ireland?”Footnote ¹⁴

The Scribe: A Look at the Irish Music Community of Chicago

Criticism of O'Neill's achievements continued into the middle of the twentieth century, notes Caoimhin Mac Aoidh, in The Scribe.Footnote ¹⁵ Mac Aoidh, an American-born fiddler with a specialty in the Donegal regional style, has produced a well-received study of the Donegal fiddle tradition (Between the Jigs and the Reels) and has written shorter articles on regional fiddle styles in Ireland. He turns his attention in this volume to Francis O'Neill's frequent collaborator and musical playing partner, the Ulster fiddler and Chicago policeman James O'Neill. James O'Neill (no relation to the older Francis, who was born in Cork) is, according to Mac Aoidh's analysis, the unsung hero of the Francis O'Neill collections:

James O'Neill has remained a shadowy figure behind the larger-than-life personage and legacy of Francis O'Neill. His story is an important addition to the study of Irish emigrants in the United States, because it is in many ways typical of the experience of many who made their way to Chicago. It is also a touchstone for the study of traditional music in North America, as it concerns the means by which Irish traditional music was brought to the United States as well as the music's growth as it absorbed U.S. influences. Because James O'Neill's musical accomplishments are linked so closely to those of Chief O'Neill, however, The Scribe must be regarded as a book as much about Francis O'Neill as about his fiddler friend.

In fact, so closely allied are the lives and musical aspirations of the two O'Neills that Mac Aoidh has difficulty prying them apart. In his text, he frequently relies upon Francis's words to describe James's contributions, as in the following passage:

And

Both passages are taken from the writings of Francis O'Neill, the first from A Fascinating Hobby (1910) and the second from Irish Minstrels and Musicians (1913).Footnote ¹⁹ Whether or not Mac Aoidh's reliance on Francis O'Neill's descriptions of James's work can be attributed to James's reticence in contrast to Francis's voluminous oeuvre, it is notable that the telling of the story of James O'Neill's contributions to these collections of Irish American dance music cannot be separated from the influence of Francis O'Neill. Mac Aoidh notesFootnote ²⁰ that only two brief comments about the collections and the collecting process were written by James O'Neill himself. We are thus indebted to Francis O'Neill's gift for recording the lives and contributions of Irish American musicians for saving from obscurity the important work of his own collaborator.

Although the first and last sections of The Scribe focus on James O'Neill's life, his emigration to Chicago, his career, and his family history, Mac Aoidh is clearly more interested in exploring James's musical relationship with Francis O'Neill and in determining the sources for the music that was collected and notated by the pair. This last issue makes The Scribe more than biography, but Mac Aoidh interrupts the narrative of James's story to ask where the music contained in the O'Neill collections might have originated. He offers several answers. First of all, a number of tunes are attributed to the “private manuscript collection”Footnote ²¹ of John O'Neill, James's father, and a prodigious collector of notated traditional music. Second, Francis O'Neill himself contributed a huge amount of music to the project. The size of Francis's contribution is not surprising, Mac Aoidh notes, as he identifies the initial collaboration between the two O'Neills as an effort to transcribe Francis O'Neill's personal (and presumably extensive) repertoire.Footnote ²² A third source, as acknowledged by Francis himself, was the printed work of Irish collectors such as Bunting and Petrie.Footnote ²³ These collections, however, contain a large number of song airs and relatively few dance tunes.

The repertoire of the practicing traditional musician in the late nineteenth century was, as now, built on instrumental music meant to accompany dances. Although Mac Aoidh claims that musicians of that time possessed smaller personal repertoires than most do today,Footnote ²⁴ a dance musician must marshal a considerable number of tunes to keep dancers moving. Mac Aoidh does not specify whether the O'Neills' correspondents and playing partners performed for social dances, but it seems likely that more than a few of them did. The emphasis on the performance of dance tunes in the Chicago traditional musical community is certainly reflected in the music the O'Neills chose to notate and include in their second collection; in The Dance Music of Ireland, airs and harp pieces were eliminated so as to focus on music played for dancing.

The Dance Music of Ireland has been appreciated as the first Irish collection to feature dance music alone. However, Mac Aoidh's findings, together with previous work by U.S. music scholars, show that an earlier New England collection may actually claim precedence as the first significant American collection of Irish traditional dance music. Mac Aoidh presents evidence that the O'Neills garnered many tunes from Ryan's Mammoth Collection, an eclectic compilation of tunes apparently gathered from musicians—including probably some Irish American players—in New England by William Bradbury Ryan and issued in 1883 by Boston music publisher Elias Howe.

The O'Neills were surely familiar with the Ryan collection, though Francis makes only oblique references to his source. In a footnote for “The Four-Hand Reel,” he identifies this common tune—now known more commonly as “The Five-Mile Chase”—as appearing under four alternate titles in “a Boston publication.” The publication O'Neill referenced is indeed Ryan's Mammoth Collection, as shown by a perusal of that collection, which contains the four alternate titles identified by O'Neill: “Corporal Casey's Favorite” (which is actually “Corporal Casey's Fancy” in Ryan's), “Lady Gardner's Reel,” “Parnell's Reel,” and “Yellow-Haired Laddie.” Mac Aoidh points out that the reel “Marquis Hansley's,” also found in Ryan's, is another cognate of the tune.Footnote ²⁵ O'Neill does identify Howe and his collections in A Fascinating Hobby, but does not explicitly cite any Howe publication as a source for the tunes in his books. Nicolas Carolan asserts that Francis O'Neill owned and used a copy of Ryan's, but this book is not found in the extensive O'Neill Hiberniana collection bequeathed to the University of Notre Dame.Footnote ²⁶ Mac Aoidh claims, however, that the O'Neills used Ryan's as a key source of tunes for their own collections. He traces instances in which tunes were duplicated from Ryan's—perhaps with changes in tune titles to render them more authentically “Irish”—directly into The Music of Ireland.Footnote ²⁷ He is not the first music scholar to suggest such a relationship between these two collections: Paul F. Wells speculated on the relationship between Ryan's and The Music of Ireland in the 1980sFootnote ²⁸ and presents his further research on this subject elsewhere in this issue. Patrick Sky also demonstrated that some O'Neill tunes are held in common with Ryan's in his master's thesis in 1993.Footnote ²⁹ Mac Aoidh, however, convincingly traces a pattern of borrowing and retitling of specific Ryan's selections.

Mac Aoidh's excellent detective work on this problem is offset by his unfortunate efforts to justify what would seem to be an act of questionable ethics, if not outright plagiarism. He argues that this kind of creative reworking of published pieces by the O'Neills should be viewed as a kind of repatriation of Irish tunes that had been previously adopted by U.S. traditions, and as entirely in keeping with the accepted “traditional practice of the day.”Footnote ³⁰ Mac Aoidh cites instances in Ryan's in which tunes are duplicated under different titlesFootnote ³¹ and then presents the O'Neills' work as a kind of corrective to the many duplications of identical tunes found in Ryan's as well as in other Howe collections: “Knowing the work of Howe and Ryan, they [Francis and James O'Neill] were well aware of the pitfalls of those publications, and given the original aims of the O'Neill collection project, they sought to rectify these problems in their publication.”Footnote ³²

The O'Neills, however, also failed to fully weed out duplicate or variant settings of melodies under different titles. The reader is asked to overlook the copying of a previous publication and even to laud the O'Neills' motives in doing so, since they presumably include the rescue of Irish music from the corruption of American influence.

This argument is not only erroneous (if the O'Neills copied tunes knowingly and without attribution, this practice constituted copyright violation, even as it was then understood) but also entirely unnecessary. The idea that the O'Neills lifted a number of pieces from Ryan's may have much less to do with musical piracy and much more to do with recording and preserving the corpus of tunes then current and popular among local players. Support for this notion may come from the relative selectivity of the borrowing: only tunes that the O'Neills identified as Irish were selected for inclusion in The Dance Music of Ireland.Footnote ³³ No other collection then available in Ireland shows this kind of selectivity.

If the O'Neills in fact borrowed tunes from Ryan's based on their Irish heritage, the inclusion of these pieces constitutes evidence that tunes with impeccable Irish lineage or American tunes that at least sounded Irish were already being played as part of the repertoire of the O'Neills' musical community. James and Francis O'Neill would then likely have used Ryan's as a convenient notated source for tunes that were already current and popular among their playing partners. For a tradition that values aural transmission as well as variations on a melody, this practice would not have been unusual, as Mac Aoidh concedes.Footnote ³⁴ It also speaks to the flow between newly imported Irish melodies and earlier imports or to influences that found their way into American tunebooks, again not a surprising trend in this emigrant musical culture.

In O'Neill's Own Words: Sketchy Recollections

Irish traditional music was the last facet of the Irish diaspora to be assimilated into the melting pot of cultural expression in the United States. Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century wove their lives and talents successfully into the political and economic mainstream of the country. They proudly built families, homes, and communities that reflected their hard-won status as Irish Americans. Their beautiful and ancient musical heritage, however, remained firmly planted in the Irish part of this hyphenated identity. It resided in a separate and distinct space from their “American” lives and was shared, by and large, only with other Irish Americans. Even the early recordings of Irish traditional music, beginning in the 1920s, were aimed at the insular “ethnic” market and, for the most part, did not achieve mainstream recognition until they had made their way to Ireland and back again, sparking a musical revival in the process. (One interesting exception is the superb German American musician John Kimmel, who was the first to record Irish dance music on the button accordion.)Footnote ³⁵ Although public music was presented by professional Irish musicians, and this practice is widely chronicled in the history of popular music in the United States, the musical lives of amateur traditional musicians have not been well studied. The fact that the O'Neill collections were compiled with the assistance of, and for the use of, such amateur musical communities gives present-day Irish musicians and enthusiasts a valuable glimpse into the workings of their forebears in the music.

For this reason, the memoirs of Francis O'Neill are fascinating for twenty-first-century readers. Even the normally dour Breandán Breathnach characterized O'Neill as “the most colourful collector” of Irish music.Footnote ³⁶ The publication of Chief O'Neill's Sketchy Recollections of an Eventful Life in Chicago must therefore be greeted as an essential companion to the recent biographical treatments of Francis O'Neill. In addition to reading about Chief O'Neill and his involvement with Irish music in his own words, one might also expect to discover untold treasures about the history and practice of Irish music in Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century, and priceless anecdotes about the process of collecting, notating, and publishing those matchless collections.

Unfortunately, however, few of these expectations are fulfilled in Francis O'Neill's autobiography. The musically inclined reader searches in vain for glimpses into the workings of his musical evenings, for details on the formation of the Irish Music Club of Chicago, or, especially, for insight into the stories (perhaps apocryphal—although Breathnach mentions the notion)Footnote ³⁷ of Chief O'Neill's hiring Irish musicians onto the Chicago Police Force in order to collect their favored tunes. The only suggestion in this memoir that the author was a renowned Irish traditional musician and collector of dance music comes at the end of his absorbing life story. O'Neill hints that he might have stolen away from his duties for a musical afternoon at James O'Neill's houseFootnote ³⁸ when his absence is somehow interpreted as evidence that he has been assassinated. “Fortunately,” he observes laconically, “the dire news was kept from my wife.”Footnote ³⁹ Finally, in the chapter covering his activities in retirement, he adds a few paragraphs about his obsession with the music. There is no confirmation or denial of those stories about the hiring of Irish musicians onto the Chicago Police Force. The only reference he makes to this supposed practice is the following: “Membership in the Department of Police in 1873 widened the scope of my acquaintance with that, to me, fascinating group of people (Irish and Scotch musicians).”Footnote ⁴⁰

O'Neill also allows, however, that his position as head of the police force in the second largest city in the United States permitted him to persuade those same musicians to part with selections from their musical stores. “The prestige of rank and influence,” he writes in the concluding sentences of his memoir, “contributed not a little to the success of obtaining cherished tunes from persons disinclined to give circulation, or publicity, for few there are among traditional Irish pipers and fiddlers who do not preserve as personal property rare strains that only favored friends may enjoy.”Footnote ⁴¹

In terms of music, however, there is nothing else. Francis O'Neill's life, the life that he chose to record for posterity, is strictly that of the emigrant boy who found adventure on the high seas and built his career in the heartland of the United States. He was a devoted husband and father who bore the heavy burden of the loss of six of his ten children, two of whom lost their lives on the same day. He was a studious lad who went on to amass one of the greatest collections of books on Ireland that has ever existed. Most of all, however, he wanted posterity to know of the indefatigable and devoted civil servant who rose to the highest position of his profession, and who earned the trust of honest men and the opprobrium of malefactors.

The fact that posterity regards the legacy of Francis O'Neill quite differently from his own assessment of his life and career deserves some analysis. The memoir was first discovered in 1975, in a handwritten manuscript, by Mary Lesch, O'Neill's great-granddaughter. A typed version, considerably expanded, was found in 1995; this latter material forms the basis of the present volume. The memoir's narrative is spare and straightforward for much of its length; O'Neill glosses over his years in the merchant marine, for example, in a couple of very brief chapters.Footnote ⁴² The greatest detail of his memoir, and the greatest length, is devoted to his reports on police conduct (and his own involvement) in the tumultuous Pullman railroad strike of 1894 and to the annual report from the superintendent of police for the year 1903. O'Neill assumes his readers know the overall history of these events and times; his main concern is explaining his role, and the duties of faithful civil servants in general, in keeping the peace and preventing disorder and public uproar. He does not shrink from admitting that lives sometimes must be sacrificed for this greater goal. His tone is moralistic but not patronizing; it is that of a knowing and incisive observer sensitive not only to the workings of the police force but also, and more important, to the ever-present politics that colors its makeup, that influences its promotions and perks, and that sometimes hampers its best efforts.

Chief O'Neill neglects no opportunity to digress on the highly politicized nature of the office to which he was appointed for an unprecedented three consecutive terms. He seems ever aware of the need to squelch crime in the most expedient way possible and to make his political bosses look good in the bargain. He brooks no insolence from those who suppose themselves protected by the bosses, however; his arrest and the subsequent conviction of a city alderman was both audacious and perfectly in keeping with his upright persona.Footnote ⁴³ O'Neill protects and promotes the men who serve on his police force, and presents himself squarely as beholden to no man but the mayors who appointed him.

His descriptions of his service to the City of Chicago may, at first blush, appear self-serving. O'Neill, however, intends much more than a mere apologia. His readership, he assumes, will be his former constituents. They know the overall history he writes about; he provides for them a moral framework for his actions, as well as a glimpse into his decision-making processes. Chief O'Neill is anxious that his readership view him as fair, effective, and morally upright.

Somewhat paradoxically, however, he is far too modest to claim these virtues for himself alone. It becomes apparent to the reader that he sees himself as a type of Irish American who contributes substantially to the civic life of Chicago. He understands that he represents not only himself but also a community of fellow-countrymen striving to make its way in middle America. Describing his opposition to the “indefensible” firing of a patrolman to serve the needs of patronage, O'Neill writes, “He was also a Protestant and a Mason, while the mayor, chief of police, and three inspectors were Catholics and of Irish ancestry.”Footnote ⁴⁴ O'Neill upholds not only his own well-formed ideals, but also those of an entire emigrant community: It is the worth of the man, and not his religious or fraternal ties, that must be the basis of promotion in the U.S. meritocracy.

The reason that music figures so little and so late in O'Neill's autobiography may perhaps be tied to this idealized portrait of the Irish emigrant. It is not that Francis O'Neill did not think his musical life important; indeed, the passion with which he pursued his “fascinating hobby” is palpable in all of his earlier writings, as well as in the final chapter of his Sketchy Recollections. Posterity recognizes that his considerable contributions to the continuing life of Irish traditional music are unparalleled. He obviously felt, however, that his life story spoke more clearly as a narrative of the Irish emigrant who made good in the United States than as a collector and performer of traditional Irish music. The music was a passion of his private, not his professional, persona.

It is indeed regrettable that there was no official recognition of the hundredth anniversary of the publication of two of the most influential and important musical documents in the history of Irish America. However, the recent spotlight thrown on the life and work of Francis O'Neill by these three books will, it is hoped, attract sufficient popular and critical attention to redress the omission. At the very least, these worthy publications will introduce those interested in Irish music, enthusiasts of the history of Irish emigrant communities in North America, and lovers of high adventure to an extraordinary individual whose “eventful life” and musical passion worked to preserve the traditional dance music of Ireland and to transmit it to future generations of musicians and admirers.