Ballads Beyond Borders: How the Irish Diaspora Shaped Music in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Music in American Life)

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 Moore's 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 Angl