An interesting footnote to this Thread, John McCormack then aged 19, won the Tenor class in the 1903 Dublin Feis Ceol, competing against McCormack was the writer James Joyce.
Joyce thought himself a great Tenor until hearing John`s rendition of The Snowy Breated Pearl, and decided there and then to concentrate on another career, and like John McCormack the great writer Joyce became equally as famous in another field.