Scholar and singer returns home to Rochester to celebrate Irish Americans
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Sometimes you have to step away to realize where you’ve been.
And you don’t even have to step that far away.
Just ask Christopher Shannon.
The Rochester native, who lives in Virginia now, returns here on Feb. 18 to present a program titled, “A Little Slip of Heaven: Songs and Stories of the Rochester Irish, from Baby Boom to Baby Bust.”
Those songs and stories will be about a place that no longer exists on paper, Rochester’s old 10th Ward. It’s the area on the west side of the city just south of Kodak Park where Shannon, who is 61, grew up surrounded by Irish-American families like his own.
“Living in the city, being in Catholic schools, and the church and the broader neighborhood. That was my experience of being Irish Catholic,” Shannon says. “That’s what I'm trying to capture in the songs.”
The titles of some of his songs reflect the geography and culture of the neighborhood.
“Dewey Avenue” is one of the key thoroughfares, as is “Alameda,” the street where Shannon lived.
“Little Irish?” That’s the Little Irish, the teams fielded by Aquinas Institute, Shannon’s alma mater, the Roman Catholic high school that anchored the neighborhood.
Irish Catholics worshipped at Sacred Heart Cathedral and Holy Rosary Church. You didn’t have to be Irish to attend, but, if you were, you were one among many.
There were Irish pubs and restaurants. There was Irish music, lots of Irish music. Good heavens, the Dady Brothers, Rochester’s all-time favorite Irish musicians, grew up in the 10th Ward.
There was something distinctive, something special about the 10th Ward, but for Shannon, when he was younger, it was just home. That was until he took courses in history from Christopher Lasch at the University of Rochester.
Lasch spoke often of the American small town as a model of community, a place where people are united by common beliefs and values.
Shannon realized that Lasch could have been talking about the 10th Ward, a town within the city. Thus, he became not just a resident of the 10th Ward, but a student of the 10th Ward, someone who examined its history, its habits, whatever it was that made it a special place, an Irish American place.
His continued to study the Irish in the United States while a graduate student at Yale University, where he studied under James Fisher, who has written extensively about Irish Catholics in America. “He gave me a way to think about my experience in a different way,” Shannon says of Fisher’s influence.
Shannon is now an associate professor in the department of history at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia. He has written on American intellectual history and about Irish Catholics in the United States.
He returns to Rochester as often as he can, and he’s finishing a book on the Dady brothers. (Joe Dady died in 2019. His brother John continues to perform.)
Today’s Rochester is different from the Rochester of Shannon’s childhood. The 10th Ward has long been the Maplewood neighborhood, and it’s not particularly Irish now. Holy Rosary and its school are closed.
But the old ward stays alive in Shannon’s music, capturing the life and times of an Irish-American enclave within the city. A place apart, a place within.
A Little Slip of Heaven
What: A program by Christopher Shannon of songs and stories of the Rochester Irish following World War II.
Where: Multiuse Community Cultural Center, 142 Atlantic Ave., Rochester.
When: Feb. 18, 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Admission: $10 advance ticket; $5 senior and student; $15 at the door.
Contact: www.muccc.org.
Remarkable Rochesterian: Christopher Lasch
Let’s add the name of this influential scholar to the list of Remarkable Rochesterians that can be found at: https://data.democratandchronicle.com/remarkable-rochesterians/
Christopher Lasch (1932-1994): A widely published historian and social critic, he taught at the University of Rochester from 1970 until his death, for a period chairing the department of history. A native of Omaha, he studied at Harvard University (where he roomed with the future novelist John Updike) and went on to earn graduate degrees from Columbia University. After teaching at the University of Iowa and Northwestern University, he came to Rochester. The best-known of his nine books was the best-seller “The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations.”
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Rochester native Christopher Shannon returns home to celebrate Irish
