When I suggested here recently (Diary March 27th) that James Joyce wrote the comic ballad Dooleysprudence in 1916, I should have said “rewrote”.
For as regular reader David Lombard has pointed out, an original of the same title had been a Broadway hit 14 years before that, co-written by the prolific Irish-American composer William Jerome.
Our mention of the ballad “brought back happy memories of the 1960s”, David says, when at family gatherings, his father (also David) often sang a verse of an unknown ditty that went as follows:
“Oh Mr Dooley, oh Mr Dooley/The finest man the country ever knew/He’s diplomatic and democratic/Is Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.”
Confounding Father - Frank McNally on the centenary of a radical Irish-American priest.
The Irish (and Redmondite) origins of the Augusta National Clubhouse
Dooley Dooby Doo - Frank McNally with more on the origins of a famous “Joycean” ballad
Child of Prague Spring – Frank McNally on a sun-soaked country wedding
The Diary also seemed to have solved a longstanding mystery, he added, because the family had often wondered over the years where that song originated.
But while Joyce’s reworking is longer, more political, and funnier than the original, it does not include the “diplomatic and democratic” line.
That David has since traced back to the 1902 prototype, a hit in the Broadway production of the London musical A Chinese Honeymoon, before being insinuated later the same year into the first stage version of a show called The Wizard of Oz.
Sheet music of the Jerome song sold a million copies eventually. But of course, it too was a spin-off: celebrating the by then famous Martin J Dooley, fictional Chicago barkeeper and philosopher of Finley Peter Dunne’s newspaper columns.
The full name of the original balladeer was William Jerome Flannery (1865 – 1932), on which also hangs a tale.
He was the New York-born son of Irish immigrants. But making a career in late 19th century Vaudeville, Broadway, and Tin Pan Alley he found it beneficial to drop the obviously Irish surname in favour of one that might be Jewish: a more established identity in the musical genre then.
This was a reverse of the situation in boxing, where Jewish fighters sometimes adopted Irish names to increase box office appeal (or in some cases to avoid detection by their mothers).
Hence Al McCoy, a world middleweight champion who had been born Alexander Rudolph, son of a kosher butcher. Or Vincent Morris Scheer, a New Yorker who also had the Hebrew name for Moses – Moish - which morphed into “Mushy” and by extension Mushy Callahan, as which he won a world welterweight title.
Jerome’s long-time collaborator, on Dooleysprudence and many other songs, was a Hungarian Jew named Jean Schwartz.
And such was the strategic alliance between the two ethno-religious groupings that the co-compositions of Jerome and Schwartz went on to include the propagandist ballad If it Wasn’t for the Irish and the Jews (1912), with verses such as this: “What would this great Yankee nation/Really, really ever do?/If it wasn’t for a Levy/A Mon-a-han or Don-a-hue?/Where would we get our policemen?/Why Uncle Sam would have the blues/Without the Pats and Isadores/You’d have no big department stores/If it wasn’t for the Irish and the Jews.”
(Another verse, boasting of the group’s joint stranglehold on political power in New York, unwittingly foreshadowed Joyce’s most famous character: “There’s a sympathetic feeling/Between the Blooms and McAdoos/Why Tammany would surely fall/There’d really be no hall at all/If it wasn’t for the Irish and the Jews.”)
Getting back to the Lombards, that family is a great repository of folk memory, clearly. David’s emails about the song remind that that his cousin Niall was also in touch with us last October, in that case on the saga of Maxim Litvinov’s lost Irish years.
To recap briefly, Litvinov was a friend and fellow conspirator of Lenin who later became the Soviet Union’s foreign minister.
But according to the poet Patrick Kavanagh, as recalled in the memoirs of John Ryan, the communist revolutionary had enjoyed a previous career as a door-to-door salesman in Ireland, selling haberdashery and holy pictures in Kavanagh’s Inniskeen among other places.
I found this hard to believe until Niall Lombard wrote with a memory inherited from his grandfather - born in Ballyhooley, Co Cork - who used to recall that circa 1907/08 he was friendly with a Russian commercial travelled named Litvinov, an occasional visitor to his area.
Then many years later – married and living in Dublin – the exiled Corkman went to the cinema one night and saw a newsreel about May Day in Moscow:
As Niall summarised: “The commentator referred to the parade being reviewed by Soviet leader Stalin accompanied by foreign minister Maxim Litvinov. My grandfather immediately recognised his old acquaintance . . . ”
David Lombard now supposes that it may have been the same grandfather (yet another David) who originated the family tradition of singing Dooleysprudence.
“I don’t think it’s too fanciful to imagine that, given the popularity of the song on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 1900s, a copy of the sheet music had found its way into my grandparents’ home and that my father heard the song when he was a child in the 1920s and 1930s.
“I’d like to think that it might have been sung by my grandfather at family gatherings in their home over their shop on the North Quays - interspersed with tales of meeting “Barney” Litvinov, Stalin’s Foreign Minister, in Ballyhooley when he was a young man!!”
