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Tag Archives: George M. Cohan


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Birth of Patrick “Patsy” Touhey

Patrick “Patsy” J. Touhey, a celebrated player of the uilleann pipes, is born on February 26, 1865, in Cahertinny, Bullaun, Loughrea, County Galway. His innovative technique and phrasing, his travels back and forth across the United States to play on the variety and vaudeville stage, and his recordings make his style influential among Irish American pipers. He can be seen as the greatest contributor to a distinctive American piping style.

According to Chief Francis O’Neill of the Chicago Police Department, in his seminal work O’Neill’s Irish Minstrels and Musicians, Touhey is the third generation of accomplished pipers stemming from his grandfather, Michael Twohill (the original spelling, b. ca. 1800), his father James and his uncle Martin, who are considered accomplished players. The family arrives in Boston around 1868, and his father arranges for his instruction from Bartley Murphy of County Mayo. However, at the age of ten Patsy loses his father and later lays the pipes aside.

In his late teens Touhey strays into a Bowery music hall where John Eagan, the “White Piper” of Galway, is engaged. Enthralled by Eagan’s virtuosity, he takes up the pipes again, and under the instruction of Eagan and Billy Taylor of Philadelphia soon becomes a master.

Touhey and Eagan tour the northeastern United States with “Harrigan’s Double Hibernian Co., Irish and American Tourists” in 1885 and 1886. This is his apparent introduction to theatrical life. Harrigan’s company stars Jeremiah “Jere” Cohan, the father of George M. Cohan, later a famous songwriter and showman. Despite a persistent legend, there is no evidence that Touhey plays publicly for the step-dancing of George M. Cohan, who is seven or eight years old at the time. Between 1886 and 1895 he appears in several theatre productions including “Inshavogue” and “The Ivy Leaf.” At the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, he plays at the Irish Village, one of two rival Irish pavilions, and is later engaged for the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis (Louisiana Purchase Exposition). From about 1896 until 1921 he plays in vaudeville skits, trading jokes with his wife, Mary, and their on and off partner Charles Henry Burke. The shows include slapstick, low-brow gags, Irish nostalgia, and a piping finale to which Mary Touhey dances.

Chicago Police Chief Francis O’Neill, a prominent compiler of Irish dance tunes, calls Touhey “the genial wizard of the Irish pipers . . . A stranger to jealousy, his comments are never sarcastic or unkind, neither does he display any tendency to monopolize attention in company when other musicians are present.”

Touhey lives on Bristow Street in the Bronx, New York City, from at least 1900 until 1908. He and Mary live in rural East Haddam, Connecticut from 1908 to 1919, then in Freeport, New York from 1919 to 1922. In 1922 he moves back to the Bronx. He dies suddenly in his home at 1175 Concourse, New York, on January 10, 1923. He is buried in Saint Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx.

A statue of Patsy Touhey is unveiled in 2008 in Loughrea, near the place where he was born. It is a bronze sculpture by James MacCarthy that shows Touhey sitting on a limestone block and playing his pipes. Behind him, on the wall, there are three plaques with portraits of Peter and Vincent Broderick, two other local musicians, and Touhey himself. The statue is a tribute to the musical heritage of Loughrea and Galway, and a reminder of the connection between Ireland and its diaspora.

Recordings made of Tuohy in the 1900s have been digitised and made available on the website of the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA), Dublin.


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Birth of George M. Cohan

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George Michael Cohan, legendary song and dance man, is born to Irish Catholic parents in Providence, Rhode Island on July 3, 1878.

A baptismal certificate from St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church indicates that Cohan was born on July 3, but Cohan and his family always insist that he had been “born on the Fourth of July!” His parents are traveling vaudeville performers, and he joins them on stage while still an infant, first as a prop, learning to dance and sing soon after he could walk and talk. As a child, he and his family tour most of the year and spend summer vacations from the vaudeville circuit at his grandmother’s home in North Brookfield, Massachusetts.

In 1904 Cohan produces his first successful musical play, Little Johnny Jones, in which he plays the character The Yankee Doodle Boy. As a songwriter, he is a charter member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). His popular song catalog includes “The Yankee Doodle Boy,” “Venus, My Shining Love,” “I Guess I’ll Have to Telegraph My Baby,” “My Musical Comedy Maid,” “Revolutionary Rag,” “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “You Remind Me of My Mother,” “Life’s a Funny Proposition After All,” “Mary’s a Grand Old Name,” “So Long, Mary,” “Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway,” “I Was Born in Virginia,” “Harrigan,” “Over There” (the song of World War I which earns Cohan the Congressional Medal of Honor), “In the Kingdom of Our Own,” “Nellie Kelly, I Love You,” “When June Comes Along With a Song,” “Molly Malone,” “Where Were You, Where Was I?,” “The Song and Dance Man,” “Billie” and the patriotic theme song and 2002 Towering Song Award winner, “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”

The more than 40 musical dramas Cohan writes, produces, directs and stars in on Broadway include The Governor’s Son, Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway, Little Johnny, George Washington, Jr., The Honeymooners, The Yankee Prince, The Little Millionaire, Hello, Broadway, The Talk of New York, Fifty Miles From Boston, The American Idea, The Man Who Owns Broadway, The Cohan Revue (1916, 1918), The Royal Vagabond, The Merry Malones, Little Nellie Kelly, The Rise of Rosie O’Reilly, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, Seven Keys to Baldpate, The Miracle Man, Hit the Trail Hailday, Broadway Jones, A Prince There Was, The Song and Dance Man, American Born, Gambling, Dear Old Darling, The Return of the Vagabond, The Tavern, Elmer the Great, The O’Brien Girl, Ah, Wilderness! and I’d Rather Be Right.

In 1942, Cohan’s life is documented in the film Yankee Doodle Dandy.

George M. Cohan dies of cancer at his Manhattan apartment on Fifth Avenue on November 5, 1942, surrounded by family and friends. His funeral is held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and is attended by thousands of people, including five governors of New York, two mayors of New York City and the Postmaster General. The honorary pallbearers included Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Frank Crowninshield, Sol Bloom, Brooks Atkinson, Rube Goldberg, Walter Huston, George Jessel, Connie Mack, Joseph McCarthy, Eugene O’Neill, Sigmund Romberg, Lee Shubert and Fred Waring. He is interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City, in a private family mausoleum he had erected a quarter century earlier for his sister and parents.

On September 11, 1959, Oscar Hammerstein II presents an eight-foot high, bronze statue of Cohan in the heart of Times Square on Broadway.


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Founding of the American Irish Historical Society

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The American Irish Historical Society (AIHS), a historical society devoted to Irish American history, is founded in Boston on January 20, 1897. In continuous operation since its founding, the Society has been non-partisan and non-sectarian since its inception. The Society is founded as a response to the establishment in 1889 of the Scotch-Irish Society.

AIHS is relocated to New York City in 1904 by T. H. Murray, then serving as Society’s Secretary-General. Perhaps the most notable member of AIHS at the time is President Theodore Roosevelt. The Society’s formal purpose is “to place permanently on record the story of the Irish in America from the earliest settlement to the present day, justly, impartially, fully, and sympathetically correcting neglect and misrepresentation by certain historians of the part taken in the founding, upbuilding and safeguarding of the Nation by persons of Irish birth and descent.” Notable members through the years have included politician William Bourke Cockran, tenor John McCormack, New York Governor Hugh Carey, and performer/composer George M. Cohan. In 1940, the Society moves its headquarters to a Beaux-Arts townhouse at 991 Fifth Avenue in New York City opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The AIHS remains at this location today.

The Society hosts cultural and historical events, publishes a journal entitled The Recorder, and annually awards a Gold Medal to an Irish American or Irish-national of significant accomplishment. Past honorees have included Bono, George J. Mitchell, Mary Higgins Clark, Wilbur Ross, Michael J. Dowling, and Robert McCann.

During the holiday season of 2016, AIHS is home to the Irish Repertory Theatre‘s production of The Dead, 1904. The show is an adaptation of James Joyce‘s The Dead, by novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz and her husband, Irish poet, Paul Muldoon.