Chris Shannon has personal and professional expertise on the subject of Irish American history. He’s an Irish American who teaches a class on the subject at Christendom College in Front Royal. The associate history professor’s interest in the topic spurred research but also inspired him creatively. The result was a collection of original songs based on traditional Irish melodies that lyrically describe a post-World War II Irish American Catholic experience.
Shannon grew up in a predominantly Irish Catholic parish in Rochester, N.Y., though his neighborhood included Italian, German and Polish families. “Those ethnic attachments were certainly not as strong as when people were just coming over from the Old Country, but they were still there,” he said. “At my high school, the day after Thanksgiving the Italians would play the Irish in a flag football game, and if the Irish won we would call it the Potato Bowl and if the Italians won it would be the Spaghetti Bowl.”
His earliest musical memory is of an Irish sing-along album his parents owned with songs such as “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” But his dad also enjoyed Irish performers the Clancy Brothers and the Chieftains. As Shannon got older, an Irish American folk band, the Dady Brothers, caught his ear when they would play around town. “The social camaraderie of listening in local bars increased my attraction to it,” he said. They played at his wedding and the weddings of most of his friends.
Shannon wasn’t always focused on his own history. “When you grow up with something, you don’t feel that you have to go to college to study it,” he said. “But after many years of doing that, I gradually returned to things that are most important to me.”
His first foray into Irish American history was when he was working in the George Eastman Museum in Rochester. The Kodak headquarters is in Rochester and the museum catalogs photography and film archives. “I started coming across all these films with Irish American themes. I saw in those movies an earlier, grittier version of the life I had grown up in — an urban parish in the Northeast,” he said. Eventually, he wrote a book on the topic, “Bowery to Broadway: The American Irish in Classic Hollywood Cinema.”
More recently, Shannon was working on a book about the Dady Brothers, examining “music as a way of tracing cultural continuity,” he said. But as he researched, he realized that most of their music was about Ireland and not Irish America. “I started thinking, this life deserves expression in song,” he said. “I played music off and on for many years so I started thinking about telling the story of the neighborhood and more broadly Irish Catholic America.”
Using Irish melodies, he’s written several songs about his life growing up in Rochester. One features Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s brief time as the bishop of the Rochester diocese and another about what President John F. Kennedy meant to Catholics. One song is about the biggest football player his high school team, The Little Irish, ever had. The player, Don Holleder, later died fighting in Vietnam and the stadium was named in his honor.
Other songs, such as Dewey Avenue, tell the tale of everyday life. “Kodak Park taught us how to look for heaven in a yellow box/ From black and white to color, gotta go where opportunity knocks/ The Sisters of St. Joseph tried to teach us ’bout the better part/ But the smokestacks clouded out the steeples of the Sacred Heart.
“Walkin’ out on the street, talkin’ to people you meet,/ Feeling right at home in the crowd/ The best things that we’ll ever have/ Are hiding in plain view.”
Hear the songs
Chris Shannon will perform “A Little Slip of Heaven: Songs and Stories of the American Irish, from Baby Boom to Baby Bust” March 10 at 6 p.m. at the Samuels Public Library, 330 E. Criser Road, Front Royal. Find out more at samuelslibrary.net or call 540/635-3153.
