Singing Out and Lifting Up

Episode 89-Singing Out and Lifting Up
Morning lark energy vs. prat falls
This Irish Music Stories episode aired February 6, 2026
https://shannonheatonmusic.com/Episode-89-Singing-Out-and-Lifting-up

Speaker
>> Shannon Heaton: flute player, singer, composer, teacher, and host of Irish Music Stories 

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[ Music: “Bb Grooves,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

I’m Shannon Heaton. And this is Irish Music Stories. The show about traditional music, and the bigger stories behind it.

[ Music: “Morning Lark,” from Caitlín

Artist: Caitlín Nic Gabhann ]

Like how the little morning lark sings freely. No ads, no sales. It rises at dawn with its song that, maybe, has the power to uplift. At least it’s not intending to knock anyone down.

I have always known this jig as “The Morning Lark.” I associate it with concertina player Noel Hill, along with the other D tune he put with it, which he called Cooley’s. This is Caitlín Nic Gabhann playing it on the concertina.. But it’s in O’Neill’s Music of Ireland, so it’s older than Noel, And it’s older than Caitlín.

In the Francis O’Neill 1907 collection it’s called the House in the Glen. And that’s still a name people use for the tune today.

But in his 1903 collection, O’Neill called it the Yellow Little Boy.

Now people apparently used to call gold coins yellow boys.

But the Yellow Little Boy was certainly a reference to a character in a a groundbreaking newspaper comic strip series called Hogan’s Alley. This was a cartoon about Irish and other immigrants living in the New York slums, created by Richard Felton Outcault. He was born in Lancaster, Ohio in 1863. His parents Jesse and Catherine had come over from Germany. Richard was probably their only child.

[ Music: “Mountain Grooves,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

His series debuted in February 1895 as a black-and-white single-panel cartoon. The main character was this bald, grinning boy with buck teeth and big ears, who lived in a slum with other quirky tenement kids. Three months later Hogan’s Alley came out in color. Now the kid wearing a big dumb yellow nightshirt.

It was one of the very first series to use speech balloons, after initially using text on the boy’s shirt. This was revolutionary and helped launch the modern comic strip. And the bright yellow shirt inspired ‘yellow’ journalism, which was about using bright illustrations and sensational, click-bait headlines to sell more newspapers. (Pulitzer used that approach.)

But it wasn’t just the bright colors and speech balloons that Richard used that got people’s attention.  People really got a kick out of his wacky look at urban chaos. They laughed at his take on New York City’s immigrant squalor. And they laughed at Mickey Dugan, the Yellow little Boy character.

[ Music: “My Love is in America,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

I guess he was supposed to be this Irish slum child. But Richard drew him with some of the stereotypes that people were using for Chinese people.

[ Music: “Dark Low Jig,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

That yellow shirt really resonated with the “Yellow Peril” propaganda that villainized and dehumanized Asians. Through comics, posters, cartoons, and sheet music made for mass audiences—-all over  pop art, but also across high art and literature—everywhere you looked in the U.S. and Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, you’d see these simplistic, pejorative portrayals of Asian people, especially Chinese people. They were drawn as an invasive, fiendish, disease-ridden “yellow race.”

One reviewer described Richard’s comic strip boy with the  yellow clothing, squinted eyes, buck teeth, and big ears  as a “Chinese-Irishman.”

A lot of those 19th century and 20th century visual tropes used to mock Chinese immigrants and urban poverty overlapped with the Irish “Mick” mockery. Weird exaggerated ape-like features, severe expressions, jutting jaws, low brows. Sly grins, figures wielding pickaxes, knives, hatchets, shillelaghs. These were ‘characters’ depicted as drunk or opium-addled savages. It was a blend of gross humor and genuine alarm at these hordes from China and Ireland, who seemed so threatening.

Comics, vaudeville acts, political cartoonists—they all used this shtick. And of course some of this stuff is still in play in some circles.

One of the more realistic visual elements that Richard Outcoult used was the costuming. That Little Yellow Boy dressed in a nightshirt—that’s probably because that’s all he had to wear.

Cartoonists like Joseph Keppler often showed ragged immigrants as a critique of haves and have nots.

[ Music: “Little Bird Lullaby,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

He condemned Ulysses S. Grant and his corrupt administration in the weekly Puck magazine which launched in 1876.

And in Harper’s Weekly Thomas Nast depicted Irish in torn clothes and run down shanties. He showed them as victims: victims of corrupt bosses. And he mxed a lot of sympathy in with the stereotypes.

Journalist Jacob Riis paired photos with his reporting, instead of cartoons. And his photos of Americans in tattered rags, with the barefoot kids in the crowded tenements, the filthy overcrowded homes—they were arresting. When Theodore Roosevelt served as New York Police Commissioner, Riis took him on a tour of the squalid tenements. This inspired Roosevelt to reform the police force and offer housing support. And then as President, Roosevelt launched child welfare initiatives. He credited Riis for shining a light on problems and inspiring national reforms.

[ Music: Mountain Grooves reprise ]

At the end of the day, though, Richard and his Hogan’s Alley rag tag crew in the stupid clothes and the slapstick situations outsold ‘em all.  He turned slum squalor into a hilarious spectacle, and he hooked mass audiences. He got Americans laughing at poverty without pushing for change. He pushed the laughs. And as we know from TikTok, pushing someone over instead of picking someone up gets more views.

After Hogan’s Alley stopped running in 1897, Richard started a similar series, McFadden’s Row of Flats. Same old stereotypes. But without the prominent Chinese character this time.

It’s a very similar name to a vaudeville song from 14 years earlier, McNally’s Row of Flats, which was written by playwright and lyricist Ed Harrigan and British composer David Braham. They wrote a pile of ‘ethnic humor’ songs. McNally’s Row of Flats mocked Irish, German, Italian, Chinese, and African American tenants. The song was more theatrical. There’s a fictional landlord Timothy McNally who keeps trying to collect the rent. The cops show up to evict the tenants. Chaos ensues. And they all sort of end up uniting and storming the alley as a goofy rag tag band of misfits. And old Tim, the landlord, remains a wealthy politician.

When musician Mick Moloney recorded this song (and other Harrigan and Braham hits), they were like cultural snapshots; glimpses of Lower East Side life in the 1880s. It was an old style of humor. But the tales were universal, and the tunes were catchy. Mick valued the songwriting, the period language, the historical significance.   

[ Music: “McNally’s Row of Flats,” from McNally’s Row of Flats

Composers: Harrigan/Braham

Artist: Mick Moloney ]

[ Music: Dark Low Jig reprise ]

Richard’s Row of Flats comic strip ran for about two and a halfl months. Then he went back to his Little Yellow Boy, with the shaved head for live, the big teeth. There was Around the World with the Yellow Kid. You guessed it: he moved from antics in the alley to adventures around the world. Then Ryan’s Arcade ran about the Yellow Kid and his pals, pulling pranks at a run down New York arcade. Each of these strips lasted about four months before he moved on to Casey’s Corner. That series ran for just two months, about an African-American bully who trains Irish-American kids to fight. Then he tucked into the utterly offensive Pore Lil Mose which ran for almost two years. This starred a mischievous young Black kid and his inept, dim-witted parents. The whole family had huge eyes and spoke in an exaggerated dialect. Poor Lil Mose ran from 1900–1902 during the Jim Crow era It played to the ideas of white supremacy and portrayed really inferior African Americans.

Richard hit it biggest with Buster Brown. That ran from 1902-1921. This was more about middle-class mischief. Less overtly ethnic caricatures. So maybe a little bit of a softer approach, slightly less problematic edges. But there were still plenty of casual racist depictions of non-white characters.

Really, Jesse and Catherine’s only son could have done better.

Well, Francis O’Neill did better when he renamed the jig House in the Glen in his 1907 collection.

And when concertina player Noel Hill recorded it with Cooley’s Jig, he called it the Lark in the Morning. That’s what a lot of people call the tune—which is confusing, because there’s A DIFFERENT jig called the lark in the morning. It’s got four parts. It’s very related, and it’s much better-known than our little Lark here, once known as the Little Yellow Boy, and the House in the Glen, sometimes called the Peacock’s Feather.

[ Music: “Morning Lark,” from Kitchen Recording

Artist: Tara Connaghan ]

By the mid 2000s, the Morning Lark seemed to be the name everybody was calling it. One of the first commercial recordings giving it that name was by Kate wade, who’s a whistle player based in the Twin Cities in Minnesota along with Roscommon box player Martin McHugh. Kate said that was the name Marty gave it. And that Marty was always right.

When I asked Tara Connaghan in Donegal to play the tune to share, that was the name she knew. Tara’s the host of In Tune with Tradition – Perspectives on Session Etiquette in Irish Traditional Music. She’s also a hell of a fiddle player.

Music swells

It’s a great tune and it’s really hard to play this tune without going into Cooley’s

Woohoo, Tara went into Seamus Cooley’s Jig aka the Bohola

Well, here’s to sharing great tunes. And really lifting them up. And using music to lift one another up. I think calling this tune The House in the Glen—or even better, the Morning Lark is more uplifting than the Little Yellow Boy. It soars to new heights. It’s evolved.

And tunes evolve. So does humor and language. And using a lovely melody in D with a nice swing to it feels like a gentle way to consider the power of names. And name calling.

The photo journalist Jacob Riis might not have sold as many papers as Richard Outcoult did. But Theodore Roosevelt called Jacob—who was an immigrant from Denmark—”the best American I ever knew.”

[ Music: “Triumph Theme,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

He said Jacob had “the great gift of making others see what he saw and feel what he felt.”

The morning lark starts to warm up its voice as the day first starts to break. It’s triggered by light—but the specific songs it sings are learned, and the bird adapts them with practice. Some melodies and trills work better than others.

So I suppose the Morning Lark song isn’t completely ad-free. Just like Jacob Riis, they want their work to reach the ears and hearts of receptive listeners. (There are possible mates out there.) And they’re trying to ward off danger, and make their own little territory as good and beautiful as it can be.

But no matter who pays attention, the morning lark sings its little tune for the beginning of a new day—and all the hope THAT can bring. A little transition from dark  to a more melodious approach.

[ Music: “The morning Lark,” from Kitchen recording on the Bb

Artist: Shannon Heaton ]

Irish Music Stories was written and produced by me, Shannon Heaton. Thank you Tara Connaghan and Caitlin for the lovely renditions of the Morning Lark.  Thank you, Kate wade, for giving me a little intel on the name of the Morning Lark. And thank you very much to the generous supporters who continue to kick in to help me make this thing, so that I can keep Irish Music Stories free and available for all.

There are plenty of other IrishMusicStories episodes. Hope you’ll give some of them a listen or a re-listen, and share them with friends and family. For more information about this podcast project, for playlists, or to kick in to help build the show, just head to IrishMusicStories.org – Thanks for listening!