The story of two Irish American city boys and an urban Catholic parish

It is March. St. Patrick’s Day season is upon us. Americans of all and no ethnic traditions will be subject to a full-scale assault by every imaginable weapon of fake Irish culture: from Shamrock Shakes to green beer to “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” t-shirts.

One bright spot amidst all this commercial kitsch will be the sights and sounds of authentic traditional Irish music and dance. Nearly extinct by the middle of the twentieth century, these traditional cultural practices, albeit in slightly modified forms, miraculously rose from the dead. From The Chieftains to Riverdance, music once rejected by the Irish themselves as a shameful badge of peasant poverty now draws audiences to packed theaters and concert halls throughout the world.

Ironically, the revival of these musical traditions has coincided with the seeming triumph of secular modernity in contemporary Ireland and much of Irish America. Where once being Irish was synonymous with being Catholic, now many Irish and Irish Americans affirm an idea of Irishness explicitly distinct, even apart, from Catholicism. What religion remains in contemporary “traditional” Irish music leans toward New Age, Celtic mysticism.

This was not always the case. The Irish traditional music revival of the 1960s and 1970s shared some countercultural energy with the folk and rock music revolutions of the day but continued to be nurtured within the distinct ethnic institutions of neighborhood bars and urban Catholic parishes.

I have recently published a book on this phenomenon: Singing from the Heart: The Dady Brothers, Irish Music and Ethnic Endurance in an American City. The book tells the story of John and Joe Dady, two Irish Catholic brothers who grew up in the Tenth Ward of Rochester, New York, in the decades following World War II. The Tenth Ward was an industrial, working-class neighborhood dominated by the presence of Kodak Park, the industrial headquarters of the global film giant Eastman Kodak. John and Joe’s little corner of the Tenth Ward was dominated by another institution: Holy Rosary parish. They grew up with little-to-no sense of traditional Irish music. Being Irish meant primarily being Catholic and living in the city.

Even as they grew to embrace much of the musical counterculture of the time, that embrace led them to traditional Irish music. Just as significantly, their experience of the counterculture never led them to forsake the urban, Irish Catholicism of Holy Rosary.

What was the nature of this urban Catholicism? Orthodoxy is not quite the right word. There is a tendency among certain Catholics today to look back on the time before the Second Vatican Council and imagine a time when all Catholics knew the Baltimore Catechism by heart and listened to and obeyed every utterance of Pope Pius XII. This is pure fantasy. As Emily Stimpson observed in her First Things essay “Requiem for a Parish”: “Culture, not catechesis, was the framework that held the immigrant American Catholic Church together.” The Dadys grew up a generation or more from the actual immigrant Church, but the communal culture of that earlier time persisted into the 1950s despite the advance of assimilation and Americanism.

As a Catholic parish, Holy Rosary retained a tribal quality, but its adult tribesmen were equally shaped by the common national experiences of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Catholic triumphalism found a rival in postwar ecumenism. John recalls attending Mass with his father and hearing a fire-and-brimstone sermon from a parish priest denouncing the errors of Protestantism. John was confused, since he had never heard such talk at home. His father told him not to pay attention to what the priest said. Yes, they were Catholics and would stay Catholics, but there were good people outside of the Church as well. His father was not a lax Catholic. He was very active in the parish, head of the Holy Name Society and would later serve on the staff of the nearby Notre Dame Retreat Center; still, he was no theologian. Culture, not catechesis, shaped his faith. Despite his disagreements with the priest, the two were teammates on the parish bowling team.

Few American Catholics saw much to fear in the ecumenical mood of the 1950s. Many recoiled in horror and disbelief as that era gave way to the aggressively secular (or at least anti-Christian) counterculture of the 1960s. Most American youth, including John and Joe, experienced this counterculture primarily through the popular music readily available through television and Top 40 radio. John and Joe had their first musical epiphany seeing the Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show. Their father was a musician, having played trumpet in local big bands during the 1930s and 1940s; he liked the early Beatles and would play their songs on his trumpet.

Troubled by the psychedelic turn of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, he nonetheless continued to share his love of music with his sons even as they delved further into edgier aspects of the musical counterculture. The late 1960s saw a turn away from psychedelia and toward American roots music, perhaps best captured by the cult of The Band, Bob Dylan’s former backup band. John and Joe would embrace this, the most “traditional” strain of the counterculture.

The first sign of rebellion came with John and Joe’s refusal to follow in their father’s footsteps by attending the local all-boys Catholic high school, Aquinas Institute. Their father spoke of his years at Aquinas during the 1930s as the happiest days of his life. Aquinas was home to a national football power, the “Little Irish,” modeled on the great teams of Knute Rockne at Notre Dame; their father played in the marching band at the football games. John and Joe found the discipline and general “jock” culture of Aquinas at odds with their developing countercultural sensibilities.

Still, neighborhood ties proved too strong. By the early 1970s, Aquinas had loosened up enough to host a folk music festival, called Greenfield Odyssey. John and Joe competed against each other in a battle of the bands; little brother Joe beat out his older brother with his virtuoso banjo playing on the classic Flatt & Scruggs tune, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” From that point on, they decided to join forces. They would play together professionally for the next forty years.

The pursuit of American roots music would ultimately lead them to the roots of American roots in traditional Irish music. Still, through one of the many ironies of history, their embrace of traditional Irish music was, in some sense, a break from tradition. Though both their parents were Irish Americans, neither had any knowledge of or interest in Irish music beyond the old Tin Pan Alley tunes, like “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” re-popularized by Bing Crosby in the 1940s. Traditional Irish music drew fans and practitioners with no connection to Irish culture or Irish communities; records, tapes, CDs, and eventually streaming have made it available to anyone with no cultural or communal obligation. For many, Irish music is simply a preference, a consumer choice.

Not so for John and Joe. Though traditional Irish music was very much something new to them, they experienced it in the old-fashioned way: hearing it performed live and local by people who would become not only teachers but friends.

John and Joe first heard Irish rebel ballads by The Emigrants, the house band at The Irish Inn, a bar located a few miles north of the Tenth Ward near Lake Ontario. Martin Whelan and Brian Clancy, two actual Irish immigrants who fronted the band, would serve as personal mentors to John and Joe, who learned music from them in the traditional manner, by ear. In the early 1980s, they discovered the musical genius of the immigrant Irish fiddler Marty O’Keefe. Though John and Joe had known the O’Keefe family as fellow parishioners at Holy Rosary, they never realized the depths of Marty’s talent until they started to attend Irish music sessions in the back room at The Friendship Tavern, located a few blocks from Holy Rosary in the Tenth Ward.

The experience of instrumental Irish music led them to rebrand themselves from a general folk music duo to an explicitly (if not exclusively) Irish music act. In 1991, they released Soul Lilt, a self-produced album of traditional Irish music, the culmination of their years of apprenticeship with local masters.

Despite their musical commitments, John and Joe proved themselves most “traditional” by the life they lived rather than the music they played. Performing music unknown to their parents’ generation, they nonetheless followed in their parents’ footsteps by living in the Tenth Ward. At a time when the American Dream meant going to college and pursuing a “better” life some place far from home, John and Joe remained firmly planted in the Tenth Ward. When John’s father retired and moved to Florida, John bought the family home and raised his family there. He and his wife Carol sent their five children to Holy Rosary parochial school.

Largely due to the presence of Kodak, the Tenth Ward had avoided the decline and decay that had afflicted most other areas of the city in the decades after World War II. Such decline would eventually afflict the Tenth Ward itself, but the second generation Dady family stuck it out into the late 1990s, long after most of their neighbors had given up the fight to carry on the tradition of the urban Catholic parish and moved to the suburbs. John and Joe remained true to that Irish tradition even as they embraced a new tradition in Irish music. The autobiographical title track to the 1999 release, Singing from the Heart, tells the story of their new and varied musical influences. It also proclaims the endurance of their older ethnic identity: “It’s a crazy way to make a buck, strumming these guitars/We’re just Irish American city boys, singing straight from the heart.”