The legacy of Danny Cassidy

'A Fervent Melody Struggling to Be Heard'

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Daniel Cassidy

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Our voices carry; and though

slumber-bound,

Some few half awake…

Give tongue, proclaim their hidden name…

- W.B. Yeats

At one point in Quinn’s Book, the fourth novel in William Kennedy’s masterful “Albany Cycle,” a trainload of Famine immigrants passes through Albany. Witnessing this sad procession, narrator Daniel Quinn is told by a companion, “Pay heed to these people and remember what you see.” Yet it’s quickly apparent that listening is as important as seeing: 

“A man of middle years, his shirt in tatters, a half-eaten chicken leg in his hand, stood alone on the steps of the train and began a song in Gaelic, that strange tongue rendered brilliant by the man’s plaintive voice. Silence came onto the crowd and we listened to the minstrel, I with a growing wonder in my heart at all the joy and misery that simultaneously commanded so many lives. The train whistle interrupted the sound of the song but not the singer, and as the cars moved out, his voice reached us in fragments, audible between the whistle blasts, a fervent melody struggling to be heard. And then it was gone.”

On the evening of St. Patrick’s Day 2008, at the State Museum in Albany, Danny Cassidy, author of How the Irish Invented Slang, began his presentation by reading that scene. It took the imaginative genius of a novelist like Kennedy, Cassidy said, to perceive what historians had so often overlooked: the intimate relationship between large numbers of the rural masses who fled the Famine and their language. (The same point might be made about two brilliant recent novels, Star of the Sea, by Joseph O’Connor, and Law of Dreams, by Peter Behrens.)

Whether they congregated in crossroad cities like New York, Albany, Boston, St. Louis, etc. or spread through the country laying track and digging canals, these immigrants took their music and language with them. For many, Irish was their primary or only tongue; many more had both Irish and English. In their struggle to survive and adjust to a frequently punishing, often hostile environment, they were quick to make English their priority. Yet the Irish didn’t simply discard their language. Instead, they changed its clothes, slipping it into everyday American work duds.

In fact, Cassidy maintained, if you listened carefully to American slang, if you twigged to the sounds of Irish, you’d hear what Kennedy’s character in Quinn’s Book heard, a “voice reach[ing] us in fragments, audible between the whistle blasts, a fervent melody struggling to be heard.”

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