The legacy of Danny Cassidy

'A Fervent Melody Struggling to Be Heard'

Larger Text

Print

E-mail

1 Comment

Daniel Cassidy

Tweet

A professional musician who’d played Carnegie Hall and worked as the opening act for George Carlin, Cassidy was a consummate performer. All his skills were on display that evening. He played the guitar, sang, lectured, read, mixed schtick and scholarship, intimate details of his own family’s immigrant saga and the broad narratives of academic history, transforming what could have been a dry, if enlightening, discourse on an erudite topic into a riveting exploration of the dynamics of slang and its importance to the hybrid soul of our syncretic, kinetic nation.

I was lucky to hear Cassidy on several occasions. Each time he put everything he had into his talk—hard-won insights, artistic craftsmanship, long years of research and teaching, an innate comfort on stage, a Brooklyn-bred contempt for snobbery and pedantry, a love of mongrels, rebels and heretics. As he poured himself into explaining his fascination with the Irish-American experience and what led him to write How the Irish Invented Slang, speaker and subject, like dancer and dance, became one: Cassidy was the Irish-American experience.

His presentation at the State Museum brought him a standing ovation, which was not unusual—I’d seen it happen before—but the special intensity and vehemence of his eloquence suggested to me that Danny Cassidy felt a new urgency in what he was doing. Unfortunately, that urgency wasn’t misplaced. His performance in Albany proved his nunc dimittis. Within three weeks, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died at home, in San Francisco, on October 11, 2008, with his beloved wife Clare at his bedside.

After his talk, Cassidy inadvertently left behind the notes he spoke from. When I offered to mail them, he said not to bother. He’d used the plane ride back to the West Coast to distill what he’d said in Albany and was happy with what he had. I not only kept his notes, I studied them, especially the finale, in which Cassidy analyzed the American folk song “Paddy Works the Railway.”

Cassidy devotes several pages in How the Irish Invented Slang to a discussion of the song. The longer he’d thought about the song and the more he’d performed it, he told me, the more crucial he believed it was to grasping the subtlety with which Irish, in what was really a centuries long process, had seeped into English and stayed on the tongues of people who no longer spoke it.

Published under various titles—“Paddy Works on the Erie,” “Poor Paddy Works on the Railway,” etc.—the song appeared in Carl Sandburg’s 1927 collection, American Songbag, and is the seventh song in Alan and John Lomax’s 1934 work, American Ballads and Folk Songs. In How the Irish Invented Slang, Cassidy pointed out that “the song’s lyrics varied widely, with local versions scattered all across the mid-19th century diaspora, New York, Liverpool, San Francisco, Melbourne, wherever Paddy bent his back and laid a track.”

Print

E-mail

Tweet