"Understanding the Irish diaspora is crucial to understanding the history of music in the United States. Sarah Gerk merges analysis with big-picture views of Irish and U.S. history to reveal the social interactions that intertwined Irish immigration with American musical practices. Irish migrants instigated and maintained a social process that affected all Americans, beyond but very much including music. Gerk brings together examples of relevant music that originated in Ireland, the United States, or elsewhere, to demonstrate the ways we can think about both the Irish diaspora specifically and immigration to America more generally. As she shows, the ubiquity of the Irish influence broadly shaped popular music throughout many different communities. Gerks attention to migration history, national identity, and race brings to light both the social contexts of Irish diaspora and the constellation of transnational connections in which it took place.

Interdisciplinary and illuminating, Ballads Beyond Borders explores new dimensions of Irish music, performance, and performers in the diaspora"-- Provided by publisher."This is a study of how Irish diaspora shaped musical practice in nineteenth-century America. Moving beyond a focus on the transmission of elements of Irish traditional music to music in the US, or the ways in which Irish Americans used US musical practices to negotiate identities in the New World, Sarah Gerk explores the role played by Irish immigration, as a sociological and cultural phenomenon, and by Irish immigrants themselves in shaping the musical life of the United States. This work offers revealing opportunities to understand race-particularly access to white privilege- diaspora, and musical life in the nineteenth century, as well as to understand how particular musical sounds themselves became bound up with certain diasporic communities and spaces.Gerk opens by considering the popularity of Thomas Moores iconic collection Irish Melodies in relation to the history of British colonization shared by the US and Ireland, arguing that these songs modeled what the music of an Anglo-Celtic republic could sound like. She considers blackface minstrelsys complicated relationship with both Irish-American performers and theatrical stereotypes of Irish people, and positions Irish-American performers and audiences as a primary driving force in new musical styles in 1840s sheet music, in which minstrelsys resemblances to Anglo-Celtic traditional music disappeared. She examines the legacy of the Great Famine in music of the US Civil War, considering how that musics role in emotional life offers robust source material for understanding famine memory. She explores the increasingly elaborate sketches in the 1870s and 1880s of the variety duo Harrigan and Hart, highlighting ways in which violent conflict between the Black community and the Irish lies at the very heart of the Mulligan entertainments.

Finally, she contextualizes the work of Irish-American tenor Chauncey Olcott, showing how a number of confluent trends-the growing wealth and social status of Irish-American middle classes, the Gaelic revival, new immigration patterns, and the consolidation of the USs sheet music industry-allowed Olcott to perform an elevated version of Irish-American musical culture, influenced by superficial elements of Italian operatic music"-- Provided by publisher.