“If Shamrocks Grew Along the Swanee Shore”
One hundred years ago today… “If Shamrocks Grew Along the Swanee Shore,” an intense bit of kitsch that merged Irish and Black stereotypes, was one of the sheet music bestsellers of the week. (“Six Best Sellers in Music for the Week,” Daily News, 9 October 1921, p. 38.)
Cover of sheet music for “If Shamrocks Grew Along the Swanee Shore” (Harry Von Tilzer, 1921). Indiana Historical Society.
The sheet music’s popularity was undoubtedly helped by the fact that two competing renditions of the tune had been recorded the previous June. The first was by Charles Hart and Lewis James for Edison cylinder (June 9th). Eleven days later the more popular version was cut by the Broadway Quartette for Columbia Records, whose studios were in the Woolworth Building.
(Columbia Records has figured frequently on this site, in features for an all-female brass band, Al Jolson’s “Swanee,” and other dates.)
Listen to each version by clicking the record:
Discography of American Historical Recordings.
Discography of American Historical Recordings.
John Bush Jones writes that song is an example of Tin Pan Alley songwriters creating “an idyllic mega-myth,” by using “the two most popular geographic areas that Alley songwriters glorified–Dixie and Ireland” (229. He goes on:
The results of this oxymoronic pairing are both charming and hilarious: “If Shamrocks grew along the Swanee shore 'neath skies so blue they'd bloom forever more/ And when Uncle Joe picked his old banjo he’d always play an Irish reel / And I’d give a dollar to hear old Mammy holler…”
References/ Further reading:
Jones, John Bush. Reinventing Dixie: Tin Pan Alley's Songs and the Creation of the Mythic South. Lafayette: LSU Press, 2015.
– Jonathan Goldman, Oct 9, 2021
TAGS: music, records, stereotypes, Irish, Black, African American, recording