Southern Cultures: The Irish Issue: Spring 2011 Issue

By Harry L. Watson

In the Spring 2011 issue of Southern Cultures -- The Irish Issue --

Front Porch by Harry L. Watson
"The authors in this special issue on Ireland and the South argue that the Irish left an outsized imprint on the cultures of the American South and forged a persistent affinity between Ireland and the South."

"A lengthening chain in the shape of memories"
The Irish and Southern Culture by William R. Ferris
"Irish rockers U2 are committed fans of B.B. King and wrote the song 'When Love Comes to Town' at his request. The song introduced King to important new rock audiences."

Tara, the O'Haras, and the Irish Gone With the Wind by Geraldine Higgins
"Into the debate about place, race, and the second-best-selling book of all time, we can also bring Irishness."

Another "Lost Cause"
The Irish in the South Remember the Confederacy by David Gleeson
"As there had been only two prominent Irish generals, and only one, Cleburne, had had a very distinguished record, the story of the common soldier was the story of the Irish Confederate."

Blacks and Irish on the Riverine Frontiers
The Roots of American Popular Music by Christopher J. Smith
"One of the realities of American life is that certain features of African American performance style will remain strange and alluring to those outside the culture. Not least among such features is the making of hard social commentary on recurring problems of life, often through cutting and breaking techniques-contentious interactions continually calling for a change of direction."

Smoke 'n' Guns
A Preface to a Poem about Marginal Souths, and then the Poem by Conor O'Callaghan
"Addressing a jubilant crowd in Belfast shortly after the declaration of the original ceasefire in 1993, Gerry Adams reminded his audience that 'they haven't gone away, you know.' He meant that even as 'the cause' was dwindling, its upholders-'the boys'-were still among us. He might just as easily have been talking about the Klan."

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Release date: Mar 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9780807868393

Book preview

front porch

Immigrants preparing to board a U.S.-bound ocean liner, Queenstown, Country Cork, Ireland, ca. 1903, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

Not long before adventurers sailing for the first Queen Elizabeth set out to colonize the land they would call Virginia, they rehearsed the sport of empire on another outpost in the western ocean. They fought its native tribes and seized their lands. Irked by the natives' stubborn resistance and their obdurate faith in a seemingly barbarous religion, the conquerors resettled the island with thousands of British newcomers who subdued the natives but eventually developed their own economic and political quarrels with the mother country. Suffering spread through the island until millions of its people fled westward, many to the American South. But among those remaining behind, bitterness festered between the descendants of the original natives and the newcomers. Discrimination inspired a civil rights movement, followed by repression and abetted by indelible memories on either side. And as President Lincoln said, the war came.

The outpost was Ireland, and its history is replete with parallels to the experience of the American South. The differences are obvious too, most notably that Ireland's cultural conflicts are usually called religious rather than racial. For many white southerners, however, the similarities overwhelm this difference and foster a special affinity between the people of both places. The first white inhabitants of huge swaths of the southern backcountry descended from the Scottish Presbyterians who earlier settled the Irish province of Ulster. In the middle of the eighteenth century, these Ulster Scots or Scotch Irish (as Americans called them) brought their fiddle tunes and whiskey, along with their farming methods and their reputations for pugnacity, down the Great Wagon Road leading from Pennsylvania to the Piedmont, building log cabins and establishing churches, family names, and cultural patterns that persist to this day. And Ireland and the South both experienced a tenant farm economy and exploitation by distant outsiders, feeding poverty and grievances whose memories do not fade. The white South and the Scots-Irish were both victims and victimizers, moreover, abusing Indians, blacks, and the Irish Catholic majority just as they were dominated by distant centers of power in their turn. Scots-Irish mythology has enjoyed a boom of late, starting perhaps with historian Grady McWhiney's celebration of the role of Britain's Celtic fringe in shaping the modern South, and then embracing Virginia Senator James Webb's portrait, Born Fighting: How the Scots Irish Shaped America.

Pushed to the extremes, of course, the historical parallels falter, for most Irish Americans did not become southerners. Most nineteenth-century Irish newcomers were Catholics who settled in the urban North, unlike their Protestant compatriots of the eighteenth-century southern frontier. Even these differences can be exaggerated, however, because, as we shall see, urban Irish workers played important roles in transmitting southern music to the American mainstream. Even so, the authors in this issue on Ireland and the South argue that the Irish left an outsized imprint on the cultures of the American South and forged a persistent

Economic colonization, agrarian folkways, religious piety, ruins, and rebellion: parallel themes in southern and Irish history seem intuitive, and politicians have linked them together occasionally. But the motivations for doing so, and the points of cultural divergence, are equally telling. Round Tower and Cross of Monasterboice, County Louth, Ireland, ca. 1903, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

In Another ‘Lost Cause’: The Irish in the South Remember the Confederacy, David Gleeson shows how Irish immigrants, marginalized in North and South alike, populated both Union and Confederate all-Irish volunteer units. The Harrison's Landing, Virginia, contingent of the Irish Brigade, 1862, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

affinity between Ireland and the South. Our guest editor, Bryan Giemza, has assembled essays for this special issue that thoroughly explore the reasons for that attraction.

Folklorist William R. Ferris starts us off by remembering his personal ties to the Emerald Isle. Like ripples in a pond, his memories spread out from his own life and his own family to the life and culture of the entire region, embracing music most of all. From there we take up the case of Gone With the Wind. Geraldine Higgins reminds us that Scarlett's father, Gerald O'Hara, was an Irish immigrant who named his plantation Tara after the ancient seat of the island's kings. Nor was Margaret Mitchell the only southern writer to place an Irishman at the center of plantation history. Writing almost simultaneously, W. J. Cash described the origins of the southern elite by asking readers of his The Mind of the South to imagine an ambitious Irish immigrant and his wife who pulled a Piedmont plantation up out of red clay between the invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s and the Old South's pinnacle a few decades later. Higgins explores how the O'Haras’ Irishness works in Mitchell's version of the story, and also the companion pieces penned by Alexandra Ripley and Alice Randall. For Higgins, Mitchell uses Scarlett's Irish heritage to explain why she is different from the more fragile belles around her—self-willed, stormy, determined, and defiant enough to forge a very unfeminine business success in postwar Atlanta. Since Mitchell came from Irish Catholic stock herself, Scarlett's differences could be her creator's explanation for her own divergence from the feminine stereotypes of Depression-era Atlanta, as she earned a living from her pen and simultaneously defied and glorified the expectations of true womanhood.

No Irish Need Apply. Christopher Smith discusses how minstrel performers traveled the seaborne highways of nineteenth-century commerce to meet the African, Caribbean, and southern music of the black sailors and laborers. There also were frequent conflicts between African American and Anglo-Irish river communities; thus, an 1828 advertisement for colored laborers to work the Pennsylvania Canal construction project assured potential hires that no Irish men would be employed. Other ads also reflected anti-Irish prejudice, such as this 1854 classified from the New York Times.

David Gleeson explores the postwar southern experience of Irish people. He too observes the differences between Irish Catholic southerners and Anglo Protestants and looks at how the differences were bridged. It is not unusual for marginal people to seek admission or recognition from a dominant culture by joining enthusiastically in its wars. Marginalized in North and South alike, Irish immigrants, Gleeson shows, were no exception in the Civil War era, so Union and Confederate armies both boasted all-Irish volunteer units who trumpeted their loyalties to their respective sides. By itself, however, wartime service was not enough to win full recognition for the Irish of the South. Tracing experiences in Charleston and Houston, Gleeson shows how Irish veterans in both cities—as well as sentimental poets like Father Abram Ryan—used Confederate memorials to highlight their ties to the dominant culture and affirm the legitimacy of Irish nationality and the Catholic religion in the South of their own day.

Higgins and Gleeson explore the meaning of Irish difference in the southern world; Christopher Smith takes the opposite tack and explores how Irish immigrants served to connect even more different cultures—the Anglo majority of mainstream America in the nineteenth century and the culture of African Americans both enslaved and free. We are used to thinking of the old-time minstrel show, with its blackface performers and its nasty stereotypes, as an instrument

Conor O'Callaghan was born in Newry (here, in 2010) in the U.K. and reared on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Not fully belonging to either half of his divided country, and not fully at ease in North Carolina either, O'Callaghan explores marginality in his short essay and in a poem that speaks in a voice that is half southern, half Irish, and not fully comprehensible in either place. Photograph courtesy of Ardfern under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license.

for ridiculing African Americans and their culture, but Smith pursues a recently popular trend among academic writers to consider how blackface minstrels may have genuinely admired the beauty and vitality of African American music and dance. In this view, minstrels copied black music because they were fascinated with it but wrapped their performances in racist mockery to disguise their forbidden attraction to a pariah culture.

Smith discusses how minstrel performers traveled the seaborne highways of nineteenth-century commerce to meet the African, Caribbean, and southern music of the black sailors and laborers who figured prominently in Atlantic and riverboat traffic. Taking this music to mostly Irish immigrant audiences in New York and other metropolitan centers, they won wild applause from listeners who suddenly encountered onstage the melodies and dance steps they knew from ethnically jumbled streets and docksides. Softening and harmonizing the originals to match white tastes, the minstrel performers created a musical idiom that later gave birth to vaudeville classics, Tin Pan Alley, and the Broadway musical. In Smith's retelling of musical history, Irish performers and audiences create likeness, not difference, by ushering southern black music into the larger American canon.

We close with a poem by Conor O'Callaghan, and his brief introduction to it. O'Callaghan was born and reared on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, and he teaches creative writing at Wake Forest University. Not fully belonging to either half of his divided country, and not fully at ease in North Carolina either, O'Callaghan knows all about marginality. He tells us how he began to feel at home in the American South when he began to feel how marginality made him so much like those southerners who feel different from other Americans and yet the same. His poem speaks in a voice that is half southern, half Irish, and not fully comprehensible in either place, but tells us how otherness can make you fit in.

Is that then the basis for the affinity between Ireland and the South? Skeptics may answer that playing up Celtic connections is just a convenient way for the South's majority to enjoy feeling victimized but still white. But black southerners know all about victimization and marginalization too. If Christopher Smith is right, Irish Americans played a powerful if unconscious role in spreading that knowledge to Americans generally, so if they stretch, black southerners might discover some kinship there too. Kiss me, I'm Irish has become a standard slogan for St. Patrick's Day parades. And why not? Maybe under the skin, we all are.

HARRY L. WATSON, Editor

ESSAY

"A lengthening chain in the

shape of memories"

The Irish and Southern Culture

by William R. Ferris

Irish rockers U2 are committed fans of B.B. King and wrote the song When Love Comes to Town at his request. The song introduced King to important new rock audiences through his concerts and appearances with the band. Bono and Adam Clayton of U2, in Raleigh, North Carolina, 2009, photographed by Audrey Popa.

BLOOD IS THICKER THAN WATER: PERSONAL TIES TO IRELAND

To explore the relationship between Ireland and southern culture is for many southerners an intensely personal journey. My own family has Irish ancestry on both sides. Because of those ties, I have always felt an affinity for Irish history and culture. When I first read James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the late fifties as a student at Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts, Joyce and his protagonist Stephen Daedalus spoke to me in a deeply personal way. I embraced the book as a manifesto for my own rebellion from the web of politics, religion, and family that defined my life in the American South.

My