Bing Crosby Read Online Free Page A

Penal Code of 1695 barred Irish Catholics —
     three-quarters of the population — from owning land and businesses, from voting, and from building schools and churches or
     attending those that existed. 6 Informants, particularly those who turned in priests, were rewarded. The Act of Union, passed in 1801 amid a blizzard of
     bribes, threats, and hangings, promised to balance the scales between Ireland and England but in fact gave the dominant country
     acaptive market — fortifying a corrupt system of absentee landlords, toppling what was left of Irish commerce, and dissolving
     the Dublin-based Parliament. While the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 did away with the code, it could not abate the long
     history of religious enmity.
    Ireland became a grim landscape of windowless mud-and-stone cabins, potato-and-milk diets, cholera. The Duke of Wellington
     observed, “There never was a country in which poverty existed to the extent it exists in Ireland.” 7 and the French traveler Gustave de Beaumont found in the Emerald Isle extremes of misery “worse than the Negro in his chains.” 8 In the year the Harrigans set out for New Brunswick, the Mizen peninsula was beset by cholera and famine.
    Most likely the Harrigans spoke Gaelic, not English, and could not read at all. They were tough, hardworking, close-knit,
     intensely religious, and musical. A legend passed down into the twentieth century traces the family’s genesis to John of Skibbereen
     (a town some twelve miles east of Schull), who may have been Dennis Harrigan’s father and was known as Organ O’Brien for his
     fine playing of the church instrument. 9 The importance of music and dance in nineteenth-century Ireland can hardly be overstated, for amusements provided as much
     solace as the church. After a visit in 1825, Sir Walter Scott described the people’s “natural condition” as one of “gaiety
     and happiness.” 10
    When the ship finally docked, the Harrigans made their way through the Miramichi section of New Brunswick to the outlying
     woods of the Williamstown settlement, six miles inland, where they learned to clear land for tillage and built log cabins
     that furnished little protection against the winter’s freezing temperatures. Dennis’s nine children ranged in age from one
     to twenty. He made capable carpenters of his sons.
    Most of Williamstown’s Catholic settlers were from Mizen peninsula and were powerfully united by culture and custom. The strongest
     bond was religious, strengthened by the prejudices of the Irish Methodists who preceded them. A second bond was the tradition
     of aggregate farming, the sharing of tilled soil between families as in the Irish townlands. A third, consequent to the first
     two, was the observance of secrecy: the “sinister side” 11 of the Irish character thathistorian Cecil Woodham-Smith has traced to the days of the Penal Code. A fourth was the heritage of strong, venerated women
     (Ireland was that rare nation where husbands paid dowries for wives, instead of the reverse) who secured their households.
     A fifth bond was that of large families — small communes within the larger ones.
    Music — the public converse of the secret self — was the sixth bond, taking the form of Irish melodies and rhythms that became
     increasingly popular and influential in the last half of the nineteenth century, complementing styles developed at the same
     time by African Americans. It was the custom in Ireland and Africa, but not in Europe, to dance to vocal music; to favor the
     pentatonic scale, call-and-response phrases, and cyclical song structures; to employ expressive vocal mannerisms, including
     dramatic shifts in register, nasality, and most especially the upper mordent. 12
    The mordent — a fast wavering from one note to another and back, a fleeting undulation that suggests a mournful cry — was
     a vestige of the Byzantine influence that dominated European music in the Middle Ages. That influence