From Mick Moloney's sleeve notes on his album/Book "Far from the Shamrock Shore" 2002



Song #10 Me Uncle Dan McCann



I first heard this delightful song on a 78 rpm recording made in the late 1920s by County Wicklow born singer and Uillean Piper, Shaun O'Nolan. Nolan was a good traditional musician but at heart he was a vaudevillian who sang in a hearty rough country style with a minimum of finesse but plenty of theatrical enthusiasm. The late Waterford banjo player, Mike Flanagan, of the famous Flanagan Brothers also knew the song and told me it was very popular in the 1920s and 30s in New York. The song combines a good-humored joviality with a sense of pride in the extraordinary social and political accomplishments of the post-famine immigrant Irish. Beginning in the 1860s, the Irish began to exert a remarkable effect in American political life gaining power predominantly as members of the Democratic Party political machines in the large urban areas particularly in cities such as Boston, Chicago and New York. Preparing them for their meteoric rise to power in American urban politics was the experience they had gained in political organizing back in Ireland in the years before the famine. From the 1820s on they had learned first hand about the effectiveness of grassroots political organization through involve-ment in the Catholic Emancipation movement led by Daniel O'Connell. They had learned over and over again the hard lesson of achieving political gains under a repressive regime that denied them fundamental civil rights such as the right to vote and own property. In their fight against colonialism they had learned how to operate successfully outside conventional legal and political machinery. This acumen was to prove invaluable in dealing with the fluid world of American urban politics where the rules had yet to be written.    Their political style was based on the notion of hierarchical reciprocity which dominated social relationships in the rural Ireland they had come from -- basically that of favors given and received and favors due. The story of Uncle Dan McCan's life in America and his continuing affection for Ireland represented the pinnacle of the Irish achievement in 19th century American politics.

Here's a video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMjJcZ6Ib6Q