When Irish Eyes Are Smiling

DESCRIPTION: Known mostly by the chorus: "When Irish eyes are smiling, Sure, 'tis like the morn in Spring; In the lilt of Irish laughter, You can hear the angels sing...." The lyric concerns the singer's love's smile, and urges smiling at every opportunity
AUTHOR: Words: Chauncey Olcott and George Graff Jr. / Music: Ernest R. Ball
EARLIEST DATE: 1913 ("The Isle o' Dreams," according to Hischak); sheet music undated but probably 1912, according to Fuld-BookOfWorldFamousMusic
KEYWORDS: nonballad beauty
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Averill-CampSongsFolkSongs, p. 333, "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" (notes only)
Fuld-BookOfWorldFamousMusic, pp. 638-639, "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling"
DT, IRSHEYES*
Roud #25290
RECORDINGS:
Bradley Kincaid, "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" (Decca 12053)
Riley Puckett, "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" (Bluebird 8144)
SAME TUNE:
When the Very Lights Are Shining (File: AWTBW086)
Hiking Girl (cf. Averill-CampSongsFolkSongs, p. 33)
NOTES [496 words]: Hischak, p. 379: "[This] is the perennial favorite that was beloved by Irish immigrants (and everyone else) in the years before World War One, and it remains a standard today.... [Co-writer Chauncey] Olcott sang the number in the minstrel melodrama The Isle o' Dreams (1913), recorded the song and performed it throughout his career."
Williams, p, 213, says that "Neither [Olcott's] stage name nor his real name, John Chancellor, suggests the genuine Irish background of the man who would become the leading Irish-American performer of his day." His mother had come to America from County Kilkenny as an infant. Olcott himself was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1860. He got his big break when another famous Irish performer, WIlliam J. Scanlon, developed alcoholism and syphilitic memory loss so severe that an immediate replacement was needed, and Olcott, a lyric Irish tenor, got his part. "Olcott's vehicles, built upon earlier Irish melodrama, gave Irish Americans a kind of 'usable,' if not very accurate, sense of the past" (Williams, p. 214).
"Olcott wrote or at least collaborated on a number of the songs used in his musicals. According to his wife, while Olcott did write some songs, he also came up with bits of melody and verse that were put in shape by the regular lyricists an composers whom [manager Augustus] Pitou had under contract. He collaborated with some of the best Tin Pan Alley professionals of the day. The lyricists included George Graaff Jr. and Rida Johnson Young, who also wrote the books for several of his musicals. Among the composers was Ernest Ball, one of the Alley's most successful tunesmiths. It was Ball who wrote the music for 'When Irish Eyes Are Smiling' (1912), 'A Little Bit of Heaven (Sure, They Call It Ireland)' (1914), and with Olcott, "Mother Machree' (1910). When we add Olcott's 'My Wild Irish Rose" (1897) and J. R. Shannon's 'Too-re-loo-ra-loo-ra (That's an Irish Lullaby)' from Shameen Dhu (1912), we have much of the sentimental core of twentieth-century Irish-American song" (Williams, pp. 214-215).
Olcott apparently became the prototypical Irish tenor, but he was anything but authentic. He apparently eventually travelled to Ireland, and tried to listen to the locals singing -- and found it so unpleasant to listen to that he had to distract the person he was listening to by asking about the name of a flower. It was "a wild Irish rose." Hence Olcott's song of that name (Williams, pp. 215-216).
Olccott managed the symbolic feat of dying just hours after the end of Saint Patrick's Day, 1932 (Williams, p. 233), but the stage Irish craze had died down a decade or so earlier.
Edward Foote Gardner, Popular Songs of the Twentieth Century: Volume I -- Chart Detail & Encyclopedia 1900-1949, Paragon House, 2000, p. 303, estimates that this was the eighteenth-most popular song in America in 1913, peaking at #15 in July 1913 (#1 for the year being Joe McCarthy and James V. Monaco's "You Made Me Love You"). - RBW
Bibliography

Hischak: Thomas S. Hischak, The American Musical Theatre Song Encyclopedia (with a Foreword by Gerald Bordman), Greenwood Press, 1995
Williams: William H. A. Williams, 'Twas Only an Irishman's Dream, University of Illinois Press, 1996

Last updated in version 6.6
File: RBD25290

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