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'Those in power write the history, while those who suffer write the songs."
-Frank Harte
There is so much history surrounding us each day, but we are often too busy just surviving to really notice. Sometimes, even when something does catch our attention, we sense it rather than see it. We may even lack the knowledge to know what it is exactly that has caught our attention. It's as if the past is always calling us to notice a fading treasure before it is gone forever. When I walk the streets of New York City, I see faded advertisements on the sides of townhouses built over 150 years ago; I see graffiti from the 1970s, unearthed by construction companies like old cave paintings, and I wonder what are the historical truths that these soon-to-be-lost artifacts contain? These fading objects, which will undoubtedly be buried beneath the surface of progress, seem to call and ask me not to forget. This would be the best way to consider the collection of songs I wrote and adapted about my ancestor, the 19th-century gang leader and colony chief, James "The Rooster" Corcoran (aka Paddy Corcoran).
It was in 2011 when my sister in Ireland first emailed to tell me about Paddy Corcoran. She forwarded his New York Times' obituary from 1900, which spelled out his remarkable rags-to-riches tale. His legend begins with his empty-handed arrival in America in 1844, just before the Irish famine began to decimate the peasant population, and ends with his death in 1900, when he left behind a substantial estate in New York City. The Times' brief obituary mentioned how he formed a squatters' colony in Manhattan, initially as a safe haven for Irish immigrants who were "ill-viewed," and through honest work became a truckman and "a champion of the Irish immigrant class." When he died at 81 years of age, a huge funeral took place along the Lower East Side, since "Jimmy," as he was affectionately known, was deeply mourned (New York Times 1900). However, there was more to this tale of hard work and frugality than what the New York Times reported.
Other newspapers, such as the Meridian Morning Record, had more to say about Corcoran's rise to respectability that challenged The New...