Peg O' My Heart
© Thomas Wilson Shawcross 10 June 2005
Peg o' my heart, I love you
We'll never part I love you
Dear little girl, sweet little girl
Sweeter than the Rose of Erin
It’s the shamrock we’ll be sharing
Words by Alfred Bryan
Music by Fred Fischer
(March 15, 1913)
Recorded by The Harmonicats, 1947 (#1)
It may now be revealed that I have a secret hobby. Simply put, I like to look for connections. This is a fun hobby, so I will share it with you. This is how it works: you take a seemingly “random” event that occurs in your life and then get online and, using Google and Wikipedia, search with bull-dog-like tenacity for previously unknown events that connect with the “random” one.
Perhaps I should provide an example, just to get you started. This morning, I took Nellybelle, my 1995 Jeep Cherokee, to my local Chrysler dealership for service (Nellybelle is pulling to the right). I went into the waiting room and selected a couple of Outdoor magazines from the rack, hoping to find a definitive treatise on how to gut an elk. Also in the waiting room were a young man and his small son, plus an 86 year-old man.
As the young man tried to adjust the waiting room television picture (very grainy), the old man pulled out his harmonica and played a short blast on it. The little boy was engrossed in the television, and so he did not notice it. The old man tried it again, and this time the little boy turned around and stared in wide-eyed wonder. His father told him the old man was playing a harmonica. Encouraged, the old man started playing songs.
I commented that one seldom heard harmonica music on the radio anymore (as if I would know), and that I remembered seeing harmonica bands on television when I was young.
“Oh yes, the Rascals! And the Harmonicats!,” the old man beamed. He explained that when he was a ten-year-old, his grandfather had given him a harmonica, and he has been playing one ever since. It seems the grandfather had come out of retirement to run Mr. Price’s tobacco shop for Mr. Price’s widow (primarily because the grandfather’s wife, Alice, wouldn’t let him smoke cigars at home). The grandfather could sit in a comfy chair in a back room of the store and smoke cigars. The store also sold candy and harmonicas, and that is how the grandson ended up playing the harmonica in the waiting room of the O. C. Taylor Chrysler-Jeep dealership in Delray Beach, Florida on 10 June, 2005 (to save time, I am leaving out how he got here from Delaware).
We had a short conversation about harmonicas. His was a Hohner, but he preferred the Herring, which was a Brazilian version made by a member of the Hohner family. He explained that there were chord harmonicas (very large), double-decker harmonicas, tiny ones, etc. (I am paraphrasing here, as he lost me when he said “chord” – a concept I cannot master).
Then, he started playing another song. It was catchy and olden-sounding. Suddenly, I realized that I knew this song! What was it? Yes! Peg of My Heart! I had not heard this song for many years. I remembered hearing Dad whistle it in 1949, when we lived in the Shawcross boarding house in St. Louis. It had made me want to learn to whistle! I had nearly forgotten that song.
So, what connections could be found for “Peg of My Heart”? Using Google, I quickly learned that the correct title was “Peg O’ My Heart.” Then, I found the first connection.
In 1947, “Peg O’ My Heart” was a number one song. It was on the Hit Parade for twenty weeks, and spent ten weeks as number one. So, that is why Dad was whistling it in 1949! I think I may remember him whistling it when we lived in Olney, IL in 1948, but my memories of Olney are a bit vague. Our black Cocker Spaniel dog was named Peggy, was she named for the song?
Now, the less-committed “connections” man would have quit looking after finding this, but in my experience, there are always more connections to be found, so I kept looking. I have an old trivia book that includes a foreword in which the author states his belief that there are no “trivial” facts – that everything is related (connected) in some way to everything else. I concur.
So, the next step was to research the 1947 hit record of “Peg O’ My Heart.”
It was the first recording by the Harmonicats (who had played for Borrah Minevitch as members of his Harmonica Rascals).
The Harmonicats – Don Les, Jerry Murad, Al Fiore in 1947
Why was harmonica music so popular in 1947? Well, one connection is probably the musician’s strike of 1947. The musician’s union had gone on strike and would not permit its members to record music until the radio stations that aired their records agreed to pay royalties to the musicians.
Fortunately for The Harmonicats, in 1947 the harmonica was not recognized as a musical instrument, so they were allowed to record POMH and their record was one of the very few new recordings of 1947. With such little competition, it should not have taken a crystal ball to predict that their record would become a big hit (it sold more than 1,400,000 copies).
“The four harmonica players in Jerry Murad's Harmonicats recording team bid goodbye to their bass viol and guitar accompanists as the ban on recordings became effective. Since the harmonica is not considered a musical instrument, the Harmonicats will continue to make records . . . sans accompaniment.”
OK, so now I have deduced that the musician’s strike of 1947 (which I had failed to notice at the time) was connected to the popularity of the Harmonicat’s recording of POMH and to Dad whistling it in 1949 and the old man playing it in 2005 (and surely, Mr. Price’s demise had a hand in this too).
But were there more connections? Continuing my search, I found that the song had been revived in 1947 and was a featured song in the 1913 stage production of Ziegfeld’s Follies! Well, Dad was born in 1913, but I doubt that he was whistling POMH because of the showman Florenz Ziegfeld. Still, there could not have been a revival if the song had not been popular once upon a time, so I suppose this is a connection too.
Were there other connections? Marion Davies, the showgirl/actress girlfriend of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst starred in the 1933 movie “Peg O’ My Heart.” Many consider this to have been her finest role, but I doubt that Dad saw any movies in 1933 – it was the Depression.
Marion Davies as Peg and Mutt as Mike
However, this is a good example of what happens when one goes looking for connections. Some things may be directly related, such as the recording made by the Harmonicats, but other things may be connected only coincidentally, as the 1933 movie seems to be.
In the connections hobby, it is not easy to know when one is finished. Are there still more connections to be found? Here is one particularly tantalizing example – a 1947 photo taken at a Sears Roebuck store in St. Louis! Was Dad there that day? I do not see him in the picture, but say, what about those signs for WIRE RECORDERs? I wrote about wire recorders in one of my Everything You Know Is Wrong stories!
(Note to self: Post the EYKIW stories to my blog site)
Is there a wire recorder connection to be found here? Oh, this is a never-ending hobby and lots of fun! But, I digress. Here is the photo:
By the way, I particularly enjoy this photo because of the girl who looking back at the photographer. Note that everyone else seems to be looking at the Harmonicats.
This photo reminds me of Robert Benchley’s essay “Johnny-on-the-Spot.”
If you want to get a good perspective on history in the making, just skim through a collection of news photographs which have been snapped at those very moments when cataclysmic events were taking place throughout the world. In almost every picture you can discover one guy in a derby hat who is looking in exactly the opposite direction from the excitement, totally oblivious to the fact that the world is shaking beneath his feet. That would be me, or at any rate, my agent in that particular part of the world in which the event is taking place.
I have not seen an actual photograph of the shooting of the Austrian Archduke at Sarajevo, but I would be willing to bet, if one is in existence, that you could find, somewhere off in the right foreground, a man in a Serbian derby looking anxiously up the street for a trolley car. And probably right up in the foreground a youth smiling and waving into the camera . . .
. . . I know that if I were on the spot during any important historical event I would not know about it until I read the papers the next day. I am unobservant to the point of being what scientists might call “half-witted.”
. . . I could . . . have been an usher in Ford’s Theatre in Washington . . . “They didn’t finish Our American Cousin tonight,” I might have said. “Some trouble with the lights, I guess.
Robert Benchley, drawn by Gluyas Williams
Dear reader, I suppose by now you are itching to get online and find some connections. One bit of advice: do not let this become an obsession. One connection usually leads to another, and one can wander far afield from one’s original objective. For example, in researching Peg O’ My Heart, I listened online to an old, pre-1947 recording of it. I noticed that the recording began with what seemed to be a totally unrelated song before launching into the familiar sounds of POMH. Then I remembered hearing old Irving Berlin songs that did the same thing. Was this how songs were written once upon a time? Was there some as yet unknown connection to be found? Perhaps I will research this some day, but for now I will close with the original words to Peg O’ My Heart (some the lyrics were modified later).
Oh! my heart's in a whirl over one little girl,
I love her, I love her, yes, I do,
Altho' her heart is far away,
I hope to make her mine some day,
Ev'ry beautiful rose, ev'ry violet knows,
I love her, I love her fond and true,
And her heart fondly sighs, as I sing to her eyes,
Her eyes of blue,
Sweet eyes of blue, my darling!
Peg O' My Heart, I love you,
We'll never part, I love you,
Dear little girl, sweet little girl,
Sweeter than the rose of Erin,
Are your winning smiles endearin',
Peg O' My Heart, your glances
With Irish art entrance me,
Come, be my own, come, make your home in my heart.
When your heart's full of fears,
And your eyes full of tears,
I'll kiss them, I'll kiss them all away;
For, like the gold that's in your hair,
Is all the love for you I bear,
O, believe in me, do,
I'm as lonesome as you,
I miss you, I miss you all the day,
Let the light of live shine from your eyes into mine,
And shine for aye,
Sweetheart for aye, my darling!
Peg o' my heart, I love you
We'll never part I love you
Dear little girl, sweet little girl
Sweeter than the Rose of Erin
It’s the shamrock we’ll be sharing
Words by Alfred Bryan
Music by Fred Fischer
(March 15, 1913)
Recorded by The Harmonicats, 1947 (#1)
It may now be revealed that I have a secret hobby. Simply put, I like to look for connections. This is a fun hobby, so I will share it with you. This is how it works: you take a seemingly “random” event that occurs in your life and then get online and, using Google and Wikipedia, search with bull-dog-like tenacity for previously unknown events that connect with the “random” one.
Perhaps I should provide an example, just to get you started. This morning, I took Nellybelle, my 1995 Jeep Cherokee, to my local Chrysler dealership for service (Nellybelle is pulling to the right). I went into the waiting room and selected a couple of Outdoor magazines from the rack, hoping to find a definitive treatise on how to gut an elk. Also in the waiting room were a young man and his small son, plus an 86 year-old man.
As the young man tried to adjust the waiting room television picture (very grainy), the old man pulled out his harmonica and played a short blast on it. The little boy was engrossed in the television, and so he did not notice it. The old man tried it again, and this time the little boy turned around and stared in wide-eyed wonder. His father told him the old man was playing a harmonica. Encouraged, the old man started playing songs.
I commented that one seldom heard harmonica music on the radio anymore (as if I would know), and that I remembered seeing harmonica bands on television when I was young.
“Oh yes, the Rascals! And the Harmonicats!,” the old man beamed. He explained that when he was a ten-year-old, his grandfather had given him a harmonica, and he has been playing one ever since. It seems the grandfather had come out of retirement to run Mr. Price’s tobacco shop for Mr. Price’s widow (primarily because the grandfather’s wife, Alice, wouldn’t let him smoke cigars at home). The grandfather could sit in a comfy chair in a back room of the store and smoke cigars. The store also sold candy and harmonicas, and that is how the grandson ended up playing the harmonica in the waiting room of the O. C. Taylor Chrysler-Jeep dealership in Delray Beach, Florida on 10 June, 2005 (to save time, I am leaving out how he got here from Delaware).
We had a short conversation about harmonicas. His was a Hohner, but he preferred the Herring, which was a Brazilian version made by a member of the Hohner family. He explained that there were chord harmonicas (very large), double-decker harmonicas, tiny ones, etc. (I am paraphrasing here, as he lost me when he said “chord” – a concept I cannot master).
Then, he started playing another song. It was catchy and olden-sounding. Suddenly, I realized that I knew this song! What was it? Yes! Peg of My Heart! I had not heard this song for many years. I remembered hearing Dad whistle it in 1949, when we lived in the Shawcross boarding house in St. Louis. It had made me want to learn to whistle! I had nearly forgotten that song.
So, what connections could be found for “Peg of My Heart”? Using Google, I quickly learned that the correct title was “Peg O’ My Heart.” Then, I found the first connection.
In 1947, “Peg O’ My Heart” was a number one song. It was on the Hit Parade for twenty weeks, and spent ten weeks as number one. So, that is why Dad was whistling it in 1949! I think I may remember him whistling it when we lived in Olney, IL in 1948, but my memories of Olney are a bit vague. Our black Cocker Spaniel dog was named Peggy, was she named for the song?
Now, the less-committed “connections” man would have quit looking after finding this, but in my experience, there are always more connections to be found, so I kept looking. I have an old trivia book that includes a foreword in which the author states his belief that there are no “trivial” facts – that everything is related (connected) in some way to everything else. I concur.
So, the next step was to research the 1947 hit record of “Peg O’ My Heart.”
It was the first recording by the Harmonicats (who had played for Borrah Minevitch as members of his Harmonica Rascals).
The Harmonicats – Don Les, Jerry Murad, Al Fiore in 1947
Why was harmonica music so popular in 1947? Well, one connection is probably the musician’s strike of 1947. The musician’s union had gone on strike and would not permit its members to record music until the radio stations that aired their records agreed to pay royalties to the musicians.
Fortunately for The Harmonicats, in 1947 the harmonica was not recognized as a musical instrument, so they were allowed to record POMH and their record was one of the very few new recordings of 1947. With such little competition, it should not have taken a crystal ball to predict that their record would become a big hit (it sold more than 1,400,000 copies).
“The four harmonica players in Jerry Murad's Harmonicats recording team bid goodbye to their bass viol and guitar accompanists as the ban on recordings became effective. Since the harmonica is not considered a musical instrument, the Harmonicats will continue to make records . . . sans accompaniment.”
OK, so now I have deduced that the musician’s strike of 1947 (which I had failed to notice at the time) was connected to the popularity of the Harmonicat’s recording of POMH and to Dad whistling it in 1949 and the old man playing it in 2005 (and surely, Mr. Price’s demise had a hand in this too).
But were there more connections? Continuing my search, I found that the song had been revived in 1947 and was a featured song in the 1913 stage production of Ziegfeld’s Follies! Well, Dad was born in 1913, but I doubt that he was whistling POMH because of the showman Florenz Ziegfeld. Still, there could not have been a revival if the song had not been popular once upon a time, so I suppose this is a connection too.
Were there other connections? Marion Davies, the showgirl/actress girlfriend of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst starred in the 1933 movie “Peg O’ My Heart.” Many consider this to have been her finest role, but I doubt that Dad saw any movies in 1933 – it was the Depression.
Marion Davies as Peg and Mutt as Mike
However, this is a good example of what happens when one goes looking for connections. Some things may be directly related, such as the recording made by the Harmonicats, but other things may be connected only coincidentally, as the 1933 movie seems to be.
In the connections hobby, it is not easy to know when one is finished. Are there still more connections to be found? Here is one particularly tantalizing example – a 1947 photo taken at a Sears Roebuck store in St. Louis! Was Dad there that day? I do not see him in the picture, but say, what about those signs for WIRE RECORDERs? I wrote about wire recorders in one of my Everything You Know Is Wrong stories!
(Note to self: Post the EYKIW stories to my blog site)
Is there a wire recorder connection to be found here? Oh, this is a never-ending hobby and lots of fun! But, I digress. Here is the photo:
By the way, I particularly enjoy this photo because of the girl who looking back at the photographer. Note that everyone else seems to be looking at the Harmonicats.
This photo reminds me of Robert Benchley’s essay “Johnny-on-the-Spot.”
If you want to get a good perspective on history in the making, just skim through a collection of news photographs which have been snapped at those very moments when cataclysmic events were taking place throughout the world. In almost every picture you can discover one guy in a derby hat who is looking in exactly the opposite direction from the excitement, totally oblivious to the fact that the world is shaking beneath his feet. That would be me, or at any rate, my agent in that particular part of the world in which the event is taking place.
I have not seen an actual photograph of the shooting of the Austrian Archduke at Sarajevo, but I would be willing to bet, if one is in existence, that you could find, somewhere off in the right foreground, a man in a Serbian derby looking anxiously up the street for a trolley car. And probably right up in the foreground a youth smiling and waving into the camera . . .
. . . I know that if I were on the spot during any important historical event I would not know about it until I read the papers the next day. I am unobservant to the point of being what scientists might call “half-witted.”
. . . I could . . . have been an usher in Ford’s Theatre in Washington . . . “They didn’t finish Our American Cousin tonight,” I might have said. “Some trouble with the lights, I guess.
Robert Benchley, drawn by Gluyas Williams
Dear reader, I suppose by now you are itching to get online and find some connections. One bit of advice: do not let this become an obsession. One connection usually leads to another, and one can wander far afield from one’s original objective. For example, in researching Peg O’ My Heart, I listened online to an old, pre-1947 recording of it. I noticed that the recording began with what seemed to be a totally unrelated song before launching into the familiar sounds of POMH. Then I remembered hearing old Irving Berlin songs that did the same thing. Was this how songs were written once upon a time? Was there some as yet unknown connection to be found? Perhaps I will research this some day, but for now I will close with the original words to Peg O’ My Heart (some the lyrics were modified later).
Oh! my heart's in a whirl over one little girl,
I love her, I love her, yes, I do,
Altho' her heart is far away,
I hope to make her mine some day,
Ev'ry beautiful rose, ev'ry violet knows,
I love her, I love her fond and true,
And her heart fondly sighs, as I sing to her eyes,
Her eyes of blue,
Sweet eyes of blue, my darling!
Peg O' My Heart, I love you,
We'll never part, I love you,
Dear little girl, sweet little girl,
Sweeter than the rose of Erin,
Are your winning smiles endearin',
Peg O' My Heart, your glances
With Irish art entrance me,
Come, be my own, come, make your home in my heart.
When your heart's full of fears,
And your eyes full of tears,
I'll kiss them, I'll kiss them all away;
For, like the gold that's in your hair,
Is all the love for you I bear,
O, believe in me, do,
I'm as lonesome as you,
I miss you, I miss you all the day,
Let the light of live shine from your eyes into mine,
And shine for aye,
Sweetheart for aye, my darling!
posted by Tom Shawcross | 3:45 PM
4 Comments:
Connections pop up everywhere, don't they? Was thinking of my father tonight who used to sing "Peg O' My Heart to me" when I was a girl. My name is Peggy and I'm 59 yrs old now, but can hear my father singing that song to me very clearly to this day. Enjoyed your blog.
Peggy, thanks for the comments. I am glad to learn that this story brought back some pleasant memories for you. How did you happen to find this story? I am always surprised to receive comments on my blog stories, as I don't know how people find them.
Tom Shawcross
shaw8080bellsouth.net
I enjoyed reading your blog. I used to work with the leader of the Harmonicats, Jerry Murad. Checkout my website http://members.pathway.net/harmonicat
George Miklas
Jerry Murad was my next door neighbor back in the 50's. I lived in Chicago and remember playing with Jerry's son. He also had a daughter named Peggy if memory serves me. His son and I occasionally played in Jerry's home studio and when we got caught I remember Mr. Murad saying politely "would you boys please play outside"
What wonderful memories.
Ed Hirt
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