My Dad's Dinner Pail

DESCRIPTION: "Preserve that old kettle so blackened and worn, It belonged to me Father before I was born." The singer recalls carrying the pail, and seeing his father; he is sure Father shared with those in need
AUTHOR: Words: Edward Harrigan / Music: David Braham
EARLIEST DATE: 1883 (from the musical Cordelia's Aspirations)
KEYWORDS: nonballad food father
FOUND IN: US(MA,MW) Canada
REFERENCES (7 citations):
Finson-Edward-Harrigan-David-Braham, vol. II, #95, pp. 48-49, "My Dad's Dinner Pail" (1 text, 1 tune)
Newman/Devlin-NeverWithoutASong, pp. 260-261, "My Dad's Dinner Pail" (1 text, 1 tune)
Dean-FlyingCloud, p. 70, "My Dad's Dinner Pail" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: Richard Moody, _Ned Harrigan: From Corlear's Hook to Herald Square_, Nelson Hall, 1980, photo inset following p. 54, "My Dad's Dinner Pail" (1 text, 1 tune, a copy of the sheet music)
John Franceschina, _David Braham: The American Offenbach_, Routledge, 2003, p. 159, "(My Dad's Dinner Pail") (partial text)
Edward Harrigan, _The Mulligans_, G. W. Dilingham, 1901, p. 260, "(no title)" (1 fragment, of the chorus)
Hazel Felleman, Best Loved Poems of the American People, p. 505, "My Dad's Dinner Pail" (1 text)
Roud #5257
RECORDINGS:
Mick Moloney, "My Dad's Dinner Pail" (on HarriganBrahamMaloney)
NOTES [879 words]: According to Spaeth, p. 191, "Harrigan, Hart, and Braham [produced] perhaps their best show, Cordelia's Aspirations, [in] November, 1883. In it the Mulligans were almost disrupted by the social climbing of Mrs. Mulligan, and Annie Yeamans, as Cordelia, had one of her greatest comedy scenes when she took a stiff drink under the impression it was poison. [This also occurs in "The Mulligans' Silver Anniversary"; see the notes to "John Reilly (II)".] The best of the songs was My Dad's Dinner Pail...."
(Personally, it doesn't strike me as one of David Braham's better melodies, but it is one of the relatively rare Harrigan and Braham songs to have been collected from tradition more than once, so it was doing something right!)
For background on Harrigan, Hart, and Braham, as well as the Mulligan Guard, see the notes to "Babies on Our Block."
According to Franceschina, p. 158, the play opens with Cordelia Mulligan and her servant Rebecca Allup (played by Harrigan's long-time partner Tony Hart) returning to New York via Castle Garden; they have been abroad for sixteen months with Cordelia's relatives, including bad guy Planxty McFudd. Cordelia -- who was able to afford the trip because of many years of wise investing -- now wants a higher social standing, and pushes her husband Dan Mulligan to leave his old home: "When Cordelia breaks the news that they're moving uptown and auctions off the furniture, Dan grabs the one precious item that can't be sold, 'that trifle that held his wee bite... that emblem of labor that hung in a corner beyant on a nail.... My Dad's Dinner Pail.' It was one of the best-loved songs and one of Harrigan's biggest production numbers. Grocer, butcher, barber, et al 'focus on Dan upstage as he exits -- then curtain back up -- repeat of chorus'" (Moody, p. 136). Dan finds Madison Avenue hard to understand; eventually the family will go back where it belongs.
Cordelia, in the earliest form of the story, took "poison" because she thought some other woman had written Dan a love letter (in one version, Planxty McFudd convinces his sister Diana, played by Tony Hart's wife Gertie Granville, to write a deceptive note; Franceschina, p. 159). Cordelia was wrong twice: the letter wasn't to Dan and the "Rat Poison," as Spaeth says, was an alcoholic beverage.
(According to HarriganMulligans, pp. 296-299. Dan Mulligan is so confused by his new social state that he can't handle it, and needs to know where he can find some fortification. The maid, Rebecca Allup, also wants to keep the extra-strong hooch secret so that she can have at it and no one else will drink it. So she puts the brandy in a cleaned-out bottle labelled "roach poison.")
So Cordelia, believing she is dying, sobs out her last will and testament while getting drunk -- and then wakes up to find herself alive, allowing Dan and Cordelia to reconcile (I read somewhere that Annie Yeamans had done something similar, faking being drunk before going on stage and then revealing herself as sober -- and Ned Harrigan had liked the trick so much that he wrote it into "Cordelia's Aspirations"). Dan, in the upper-class residence, gets in trouble for being "uncouth" and finally puts his foot down and moves back home (Franceschina, pp. 159-160). One of his minor triumphs in the early part of the play was saving the pail of the song title.
Harrigan would later return to several of the ideas in this song; "The Old Featherbed" is another song in which a family heirloom is saved and (a closer parallel) "My Little Side Door" has a boy bringing his father his father Dan his beer in a pail (Williams, pp. 166-167)
There is, in a sense, a picture of the pail: when Edward Harrigan in 1901 published The Mulligans, his novelized version of the Mulligan plays (here cited as HarriganMulligans), the cover was printed with a graphic of a man with a pail, presumably Dan with his dad's dinner pail. Dan is dressed in a white shirt with a green kerchief, a brown hat, brown pants held up by suspenders, and a brown suit coat. The pail is shown in white, but it is quite nondescript. And the man on the cover doesn't look much like Harrigan to me, so it presumably wasn't taken from life.
On p. 264 of HarriganMulligans, we see Harrigan's literary version of this incident. Cordelia has acquired the new house, and is moving into it, with the old place being closed down:
"'Are ye going to sell iverything in the house?' quietly asked Dan.
"'Everything, Daniel, that has a tag on it! For instance, here's a sample of old tinware' --
"'That's mine!' cried Dan, snatching the pail from O'Guff's hands. The auctioneer was taken by surprise, and, fearing Mulligan's anger, retreated to the parlor door.
Dan looked at the old pail, blacked from the many times it had been heated over the fire to warm his coffee, when he was a laborer years before in Webb's shipyard.
"'Look, see, neighbours! He was going to take away me ould dinner pail. It belonged to me father, an' its (sic.) a relic of his and me own honest labor, an',' angrily turning to the auctioneer, 'I'm damned if ye'll sell it! Ye'll not sell a thing out of this house, Mr. O'Guff...."
It is perhaps interesting to note that, before he found success in the theater, Harrigan had himself worked in a shipyard. - RBW
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