This is a great article from the NY Folklore Society about Mrs. Fogarty's Christmas Cake and even mentions this thread. I'm a coal cracker from Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, and this song is a piece of our Irish-coal region history. Enjoy.

Volume 33
Fall-Winter
2007   

"Miss Fogarty's Christmas Cake" is an important song for the Christmas season. Coming from a background of nineteenth-century Irish humor, it is a lighthearted contribution to the more serious Christmas musical offerings.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Stanley A. Ransom, a former board member of the New York Folklore Society, is retired as director of the Clinton-Essex- Franklin Library System in Plattsburgh, New York, and a folk singer since 1940. He performs as the Connecticut Peddler, since he was born in Winsted, Connecticut. He has issued nine recordings of New York State folk and traditional music and one of Connecticut folk songs. In September 2006, the American Association for State and Local History honored him with an Award of Merit for "preserving and sustaining the folk music of New York State." He and his wife, Christina, a medical librarian, have four children and four grandchildren.


New York Folklore Society
P.O. Box 764
Schenectady, NY 12301
518/346-7008
Fax 518/346-6617
nyfs@nyfolklore.org       PUBLICATIONS | VOICES | BACK ISSUES | FOLKLORE IN ARCHIVES | FOLK ARTISTS SELF-MGT | ORDER PUBLICATIONS | SEARCH

On a trip to Vermont with folklorist I. Sheldon "Shelley" Posen, I first heard the song "Miss Fogarty's Christmas Cake," sung by performer Mick Moloney. I subsequently purchased his CD, called Uncommon Bonds (1993), and learned the song from it. Later on, when I sang the song at a local nursing home, an elderly gentleman, John Nolan, said he remembered his grandfather singing it in Ausable Forks, New York, in about the year 1900.

"Miss Fogarty's Christmas Cake" has become part of the folklore of Christmas. It has also entered the realm of folklore in a number of other ways. Edith Fowke listed it in Canadian Journal for Traditional Music in 1979 as "an old favorite." It appears in the Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry, with the author listed as "anonymous." It is often reprinted. The Family Herald and Weekly Star, a Montreal publication, printed it numerous times between 1913 and 1959. The title shows some variation, with Rick Benjamin's Paragon Ragtime Orchestra recording it as a music hall song called "Miss Hooligan's Christmas Cake." Digital Tradition, the database of folk songs at Mudcat Café (www.mudcat. org), includes the song and a thread in which contributors discuss the song. One contributor notes that in 1939, the song was performed by Leon Ponce in the album California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties, a field recording collected in 1938-40 by Sidney Robertson Cowell as a WPA project.


Sheet music for "Miss Fogarty's Christmas Cake," reissued by Douglas D. Anderson in 2006.   


The most notable straying from the original text—adding "spice" to the cake—occurs in the third verse. Where the original song notes that Miss Fogarty "tripped over Flanagan's brogans, and spilt a whole brewin' of tay," we now see that Miss Fogarty "spilt the homebrew in her tay." This last representation has been preferred by such Irish musicians as Ted McGraw of Rochester and Mick Moloney of New York City.

Fruitcakes have long been an important tradition of the Christmas season. Some like them—some don't—but favorite fruitcake recipes abound. Stories, too: remember "A Christmas Memory," the 1966 short story with Truman Capote and his aunt going for moonshine to make Christmas fruitcakes? I like "Miss Fogarty's Christmas Cake" because it treats a cherished tradition in a lighthearted way. As a folk music performer, I've found that "Miss Fogarty" livens up any Christmas program. As a librarian, I found myself wondering, "Who wrote this song?"


"Miss Fogarty's Christmas Cake" was composed by Charles Frank Horn in Middleport, Pennsylvania, and published in 1883 by W. F. Shaw, a Philadelphia music publisher. The Library of Congress web site, Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, 1870-1885, lists fifty-seven compositions by C. Frank Horn, but I wish to thank Linda Wood, sheet music librarian at the Philadelphia Free Library, for my first information about C. Frank Horn himself. C. Frank Horn was born on April 19, 1851, in Tamaqua, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. His full name was Charles Frank Horn, but he usually went by C. Frank Horn to distinguish his name from his father's. His father, named Charles Horn, was a teamster born in Pennsylvania in 1800. C. Frank Horn's mother, Matilda Horn, was born about 1820, also in Pennsylvania.

Since joining the online genealogy service Ancestry.com, I have been able to access records from the U.S. Census from 1810 to 1920. There were hundreds of Horns, especially in Pennsylvania, and also large numbers of Horns who came from Germany. According to Ancestry.com, most Horn families living in the U.S. in 1840 and in 1920 lived in Pennsylvania. This fact has made it more difficult to distinguish among the many Charles Horns and Frank Horns. There is a Charles Horn in the 1810 census, in the 1830 census for Easton, Northampton, Pennsylvania, and in the 1840 census for Pottsville, Pennsylvania.