It gave his mouth an appearance of ferocity not in the heart… His shoulders were early stooped, as from carrying the inherited burdens of a thousand dead Irish peasants… A man of some imagination, he loved the tingle of warm liquor in his blood. “My father was a gorilla-built man… The ends of a carrot-red mustache touched his shoulder blades. The writer Jim Tully described his Irish Famine immigrant father in his 1928 memoir Shanty Irish. n., a burly person a husky, muscular person, fig. In other words, Paddy was a “woikin’ stiff.” ( )įrom the 17th century to the 1920s, seven million Irish people immigrated to North America and built the canals (canálacha), railroads (bóithre iarainn), and highways (bóithre mór) of the industrial revolution that transformed the United States. At Duffy’s Cut in Malvern, archeologists recently uncovered the site of a mass burial of fifty seven Irish railroad workers, victims of typhus, cholera, and violence that plagued poor Paddy, working on the railway. In Pennsylvania in the 19th century, it was said that every mile of railroad was an Irish grave. The lyrics vary widely, with versions scattered all across the mid-19th century Irish diaspora, from New York to Melbourne, wherever Paddy bent his back and laid a track. The earliest printed version of the song is dated 1864. The poet Carl Sandburg claimed he discovered “Paddy Works on the Erie” on sheet music published in 1850 but no copy has ever been found. Paddy Works on the Erie” is one of the most popular and widely known American work songs.īut, “Paddy Works on the Erie” is also a sanas-laoi, a secret song, of the crossroads.īad cess to the luck that brought me through,
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