Bing Crosby Read Online Free Page B

vanished from most of
     Europe but endured in the plaintive folk music of Scotland and Ireland, owing to their economic and geographical isolation
     from the modernizing impact of the Reformation and Renaissance. A 1950s edition of
Chambers’s Encyclopaedia
defines the mordent as a “certain oscillation or catch in the voice as it comes to rest momentarily upon a sustained sound” 13 and goes on to qualify it as a basic attribute of “crooning.” Among young Celtic singers of the twenty-first century, the
     mordent-heavy approach is known as
sean nos, 14
or old style, but it was new to Americans in the 1920s, when Dennis Harrigan’s great-grandson pinned the mordent to popular
     music like a red rose.
    Sealing the family’s bargain with the New World, Catherine Harrigan, in her early forties, gave birth on September 6, 1832,
     to her eleventh child, the only one born in North America, Dennis Jr. It would have greatly surprised Bing Crosby to learn
     that his maternal grandfather was Canadian; he assumed he was Irish born, and wrote as much in his memoir and on his mother’s
     death certificate. 15 (When Bing attempted to trace the family line during a visit to Ireland, he was thwarted by his certainty in the matter.) 16 If Dennis Sr. embodied the trials of transatlantic resettlement, his son — born inNew Brunswick and baptized at St. Patrick’s in Miramichi — would personify the westward journey into and across the United
     States.
    By 1835 his family, like so many of Williamstown’s interconnected tribes, was earning much of its livelihood from logging
     and timber. The desirable riverfront land had been taken by previous settlers, but the rigors of clearing tracts acclimated
     the newcomers and taught them to survive the wilderness. Protestants and Catholics often worked together, united by the hostile
     environment. Dennis Harrigan’s appointment as overseer of highways in 1839 affirmed the increasingly significant Catholic
     presence. But the old enmities persisted. Catholics were characterized as criminal or rowdy and were severely punished; one
     man was hanged for stealing twenty-five pennies and a loaf of bread. Catholic children had to travel long distances to escape
     the schooling of Methodist crusaders. The first Catholic teacher, James Evers, hired in 1846, was falsely accused of sexually
     molesting a Methodist student and was fired. A petition attesting to his “good moral character” was signed by thirteen parents
     of Williamstown, including Dennis Harrigan. 17 Evers spent two years futilely defending himself, then cleared out in 1849, at which time the Court of General Sessions at
     Newcastle concluded that he was a man of “moral and sober habits” and “taught to our satisfaction.”
    Evers’s calamity prefigured that of Williamstown. As Great Britain reduced tariffs on timber from the Baltic countries, New
     Brunswick’s timber industry declined. Town merchants foreclosed on their debts. Opportunities in the western United States
     lured away the settlers’ children. The Williamstown settlement would be little remembered today but for the inordinate number
     of eminent Americans whose New World roots are in those woods. 18 Dennis Harrigan’s descendants alone include, among his grandsons, William and John Harrigan, who built the Scotch Lumber
     Company in Fulton, Alabama; Emmett Harrigan, head of a major law firm in St. Paul and an unsuccessful candidate for the U.S.
     Senate; and Ellen Sauntry’s brazen Miramichi-raised son, William Sauntry Jr., the millionaire lumber baron of Stillwater,
     Minnesota, known as “the King of the St. Croix,” whose garish mansion, the Alhambra, stands today as a Stillwater tourist
     attraction. Dennis’s great-grandsons include Lyman Sutton, president of Stillwater’s Cosmopolitan State Bank; Gordon Neff,
     whose chain stores introduced supermarkets to Los Angeles; ColonelBill Harrigan, who helped rescue the First World War’s “Lost