From Sligo to the South Side:
The Working Life of Kevin Henry
Introduction and Interview by Kieran O’Hare
From Issue #1 of Éirways Magazine
There are few things in life more enjoyable than a visit to the home of Kevin and Pauline Henry, way down on the South Side of Chicago. It’s a small, cozy house, well over a hundred blocks south and forty blocks west of the Hancock Building downtown on Michigan Avenue, a landmark which Sligo-born Kevin helped to build as an ironworker during the late 1960s. As happy as you are to be there, Kevin and Pauline always seem even more happy to see you: radiant smiles, and the warmest of welcomes. Seated at a table in the front room, Kevin holds forth about life and music and history. Pauline, whose hospitality is famous, is back and forth to the kitchen, producing pots of tea and plates of biscuits, sandwiches, a glass of wine. This is all to fuel the talking, and the laughter, of course, the main reasons for your visit. Kevin has an unforgettable voice, a theatrical way with a story, a charming manner, and the accent he left Ireland with. Pauline, born in Roscommon, whose very presence lights up any room, interjects occasionally to clarify a point, or to encourage Kevin’s recollections.
Kevin Henry is a legend in the world of traditional music. His style of playing the flute, learned in and around his family’s home in Sligo, is rhythmic and pure, and his dedication to the uilleann pipes and to the lore that surrounds that instrument is profound. He’s a passionate advocate for ‘our music’ as he calls it, and for well over forty years he has led a weekly session in Chicago.
But alongside Kevin’s passionate devotion to traditional music, there’s another story, one you only get after you’ve spent a great deal of time talking and listening. It’s a fascinating narrative of economic migration and unbelievably hard work. His story, like that of so many women and men of his generation, starts in rural Ireland, and wends its twisting way from a farm to a big city in a distant country. Emigration is often spoken of in numbers and statistics. However, Kevin and Pauline and every other emigrant have a personal story of multi-faceted complexity, about the hardships of leaving home, the excitement of discovery, and the value of the work they did to create a life. —Kieran O’Hare
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Kevin: I was born in 1929. County Sligo, on the borders of Mayo.
My father was born in 1872 and his father was a Fenian. He liked music, and the funny thing, you see, with music, the cattle love music. The cattle loved it, especially if you were singing a song to them while you were milking the cows, or you hummed a tune. I used to often hear him humming Drowsy Maggie, and what was the other tune, The Steam Packet. Oh it was a big hit, they really poured out their milk to you!
My father was a small farmer. We had forty acres, plus bog and inarable if you know what I mean. Not decent, you couldn’t say it was all decent. You could walk it mind you, but you’d go to your neck in some of it too!
We burned lime for a sideline. There was limestone on the property. I was 14 at the time, 14 or 15. Because we were burning lime at the time, we used to go to the mines in Arigna periodically for culm (anthracite coal, used as fuel — Ed.), and sometimes you’d go down to the pit and there wasn’t enough coal to fill the lorry as we called it, and you had to go in and poke out the rest of it yourself ’til you got the lorry filled. It was cold, cold, and wet from when you went in and the rain came down on you, and you came out of it as black as soot.
They tried to make a shop boy out of me, so they did. The bottom line was, you had to serve three years for nothing, you got your grub, but you had to travel in and out. ’Twas a big deal, there was more looking for the same bloody job too, in Tubbercurry, on the main drag. ’Twas a grocer shop where they had all sorts of stuff, and all the neighborhood came into you. Tea and sugar came in big chests at that time, the war was on, and people that had a big crowd of kids, they got loads of tea and sugar, and people that was only two women, or a man and an old woman, they were craving for a cup of tea, they’d nearly beg you — you sort of felt sorry for them, and you gave them a bit extra, and sometimes you’d be pulled over the coals for it.
Pauline: An incident happened when he was about 10 or 11, serving Mass.
Kevin: It was the custom at the time in Ireland they ballyragged somebody that got knocked up in the family way. So who was the best one to get on your trail was the priest. So I was serving Mass along with a couple of more and he was up on the altar and he said ‘Aaaaah, that shouldn’t have never happened! They’re going to hell for all eternity!’ And he said, ‘That bitch of a woman and that dog of a man that done this thing to her…’ — she was married — and the next thing his false teeth flew out of his mouth and went down the steps, and I guess I had to follow them! I put them back in his mouth again, to finish the story! That’s a true story!
I grew up without radios or televisions and the only entertainment we had was flute playing and fiddling. That was in my part of the country — Coleman Country was strictly fiddle and flute. I had one fiddle in my house. I’d be a fiddler myself only for I was left-handed. I had one flute, and I got that from an old fellow that died. The flute I have now, actually speaking I didn’t know the history of it until a guy from Boston came around here and he looked at it, and he was an authority on flutes, he collected them. And he said, ‘Do you know your flute was made in 1815?’ It is old for a flute, it’s different.
You’d play at a country house dance and you play your eyes out, you know, a young fellow about 17 or 18, and you blowing your heart out for a cup of a tea and a piece of soda bread with jam on top, that’s what you got for the whole flaming night. And when it comes to the going home part of it, if you want to get a girl nobody will go with you, for the simple reason the only place that music was played was on the feckin’ street! That’s where you heard the travelling people that played the music, and the women wouldn’t go with you because they figured that you’d take to travelling yourself!
Because I grew up in the farming, and I could use a spade and a shovel, my brother sent me the loot, you know, the fare, to take a boat over to meet him in England. The hay was the first. Haymaking, that was the first thing that you got hired at, and there was hiring places, such as Skipton, Kirby Steven. It was at these hirings, a gathering of people that was there for the hiring, and the farmer came in, providing that the glass on the wall wasn’t saying rain in the making, or he wouldn’t hire you that day. Only certain days you could go, and you had to go back to those kiphouses. A shilling a night.
The farms in Lincolnshire, rough times. Agricultural. Some of it was day work, more of it was piece work, but piece work is where you have five or six guys, and you take on say an acre, forty or fifty acres, or sixty acres of wheat, and you stooped, that was the way it was done then. And then after that you went to the harvest, and the oats was another thing that you did, and then again after that came the beets and the potatoes. That was hard on the back. You took on that as piece work, for so much an acre.
You were treated bad. Bad. The bottom of the barrel. You had to clean out where the chickens was, and that’s where you put up shop and slept for the six weeks, two months you were there. That was the late ‘40s and into the ‘50s. There was rationing, yeah, ration books and the whole nine yards. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry under the blazing sun. ’Twas hard work, but ’twas good, you were there for the season, and that was a part of getting a few quid together as we say, a few pound, you went to London, or you went to Manchester, or you went to where the work was, you know. You’d eat up a lot of your money if you went back home. Some people, that was the ritual, they’d go home then, and that was it until the next year. The farmer’d send for them, ‘Would you come back, I need you’.
I went to Manchester, I didn’t live that long in Manchester, but I used to go to Manchester because it was the best town in England for music. It was better than London. London, the policeman would come in and tell you to get to hell outta here, and you nearly had to go down on your knees to some landlords (publicans — Ed.) to play a goddamn tune, and more’d tell you, ‘No we don’t allow it in here’. In the ’50s, actually, there was only one place in London where you could play openly, and that was at the movie houses down in the City. You know the queue-up for the movie, you went along the queue and you played your music outside. They gave you whatever they wanted.
I played in the dance halls on the bagpipes. I started them in England, for the simple reason that the flute or the fiddle couldn’t be heard, there was no microphones. I had the idea of getting a set of bagpipes because there was a pipe band in my neighborhood at home and a lot of the flute players could play the pipes, and they played it in traditional style, not with all the grips and the other Scottish ornaments. I was what they call a ‘freelance piper’, and a lot of the pipers hated me because I didn’t throw in the extra grips and all.
I was at a farm one time up in the wilds of Westmoreland. I got a hay month, that’s where you hired out, and this evening it was raining like the hammers of hell, and he said, I must go out and bring in the cows. I said you don’t have to, I said, I’ll bring them in for you. And I went up with my war pipes and blew them up. And every cow and calf and sheep in the whole place came around. So that’s the way in Ireland, I said, we round up our herd!
I had no more plan than the hobs of hell. I was never afraid of work. Yeah, we were making big money, I was working in the mines, the coal mines. I worked in Lancashire, and I worked in Yorkshire, anyplace there was big money I moved in. You had to go down on your two knees to work the shift. We were more or less driving tunnels to the coal face. Drilling and blasting and drilling and blasting again. You were a miner.
I thought about going to Australia. They’d pay you to go to Australia, they’d pay your ways to Australia, but you had to sign up for two years, a contract. But in Canada you paid your own ways, and paddled your own canoe as they say, so I canoed over to Canada. I was in St. John’s, Newfoundland, first. I tell you one thing, it was the worst thing I ever saw, talk about poverty in Ireland! I thought they were the same as I left in the old country, they talked with the same language and wore the same gear.
I looked for work, and I couldn’t find it, but I had my passage paid to Nova Scotia. I went to Halifax. I got a job in a convent, putting an extension onto it with a pair of hobnail boots on me and the nuns, the first thing was that I was spoiling the floors with my shoes! I had nails on them, you know, because you wore nails in them days, with the shoes.
I had ten pound with the boat that I came out on. You had to send money before you, and you only could send ten pound, so I picked up some money in Montréal, and I went down to the labour exchange to think I’d find work, and there was a queue about three blocks long looking for work. No dice in Montréal of all places. I went to Toronto. I got in contact with a few guys, and they took me out with them, a dollar an hour, Halifax was only sixty-eight cents an hour. Thirty-two bucks for five and a half days. A loaf of bread and a quart of milk. The ways I felt was, I left good work and I came into bad work, and why did I leave good work in London?
Why did I come to America? I had so many folks here. All my father’s people came to Chicago, my mother’s people came to New Jersey, and I heard so many stories of the American ways of life, all of that. I heard that growing up, how ‘we made a fortune’ and ‘there was gold on the streets and all you had to do was pick it up’.
I went to New York, I had an aunt in upstate New York, Mamaroneck. I worked in the tunnels down in the City, subway tunnels. I could take the air, compressed air. Some people can’t take it. You don’t wear a mask, you have to be in the best of shape, no cold. You don’t want to be the canary! The tunnels are a different kettle of fish altogether. You went down in the compressed air and you got, say, twenty pound of air, it’s pumped in to you. And then you come out of it and you go to work. They pump it into a tunnel where you’re at and keep it in there. It’s all sealed. You had to spend about a half hour, twenty-five minutes in there to get the whole works of it. Then you came out and you went to work. Then you had to go back into it again to get decompressed or you’d get the bends. I got near them. The tunnels were good, oh good pay. I was at it for about six months.
I got on in the union in the late ’50s, around ’58 or ’59. I belonged to ten feckin’ unions here in this country. Ten. Tuckpointers, Musicians. I was the first piper to join the Musicians in New York. It’s in the union records, yeah. I was in the 802 in New York, that’s the Musicians. The Ironworkers, the Laborers, the Sandhogs, the Waiters. Oh yeah, to be a waiter in New York. I was a plain waiter, out on the beach, on Rockaway Beach, in the summertime. I was in New York for two seasons. The Irish Riviera, Rockaway. There was bars there, that’s where Irish music was played. Went up and played the hell out of Miss McLeod’s Reel on the pipes, and a tune on the flute. Yeah, you got tips. ‘How long you out here?’ ‘Just landed?’ You got more. If you were here any length at all they wouldn’t give you nothing!
I was in New York first and then I came into Chicago, and I spent a year in Chicago, and then I went to Montana for a year. My brother Andy went out there as a tuckpointer to Great Falls. And he said that things were at a slower pace. It was wintertime and there was nothing doing here in Chicago. So I went out and I got hired out there. I worked in the pits and all of that, copper. He didn’t, his eyesight wasn’t good enough. Bore a hole and blast it and Bob is your uncle. Take it out and put it in a cart, and bore more holes. It’s about the same thing as coal mining. ‘Twas strictly work, if you know what I mean. Not much joy, cold as a witch’s tit.
I got to hell outta there. I was going for California actually, sightseeing and work. You know, you hear everything through the grapevine of such a guy went to California and he found work right away, and you figure you’d do the same thing yourself.
Pauline: The strange thing, we must have been meant to be married. I was going back to Ireland, and he was going to California in the car with his brother, and the car stopped and he had to come back to Chicago.
Kevin: It ran into a drift of snow. I came straight back to Chicago again. I met her at a dance. I was bartending. ’Twas a dance hall down here on the South Side, 79th and Halstead. A guy by the name of Bill Furlong had it.
Pauline: So it must have meant to be because I was going back to Ireland to go to Lourdes, that’s ’58, we met in February of 1958. Well, this is what he said, he didn’t go down on one knee, and say, ‘Will you marry me?’ He said, ‘I suppose you wouldn’t marry me in America?’ I said, ‘No, I wouldn’t’. ‘Well,’ he said — now he hadn’t been home in seven years — rolling stone like himself and Andy had a great time I guess, so he said, ‘Well, would you marry me in Ireland?’ I said, ‘I would, you know’. ‘Ok, then, I’m going looking for an engagement ring’, and actually it was him, I didn’t do a thing about it, he went off and he got the engagement ring. I wanted him to pick what he wanted. But that was how, so it must have meant to be, I was going back to Ireland —
Kevin: She’s still going back!
(peals of laughter)
Give me a drop of that wine. A drop of wine, it’s great for you. They had it at Cana. It’s in the Bible it’s good for me! Well, I didn’t read that much of it…
’Twas a sewed up shop, the ironworkers. I worked in the wells here. Wells were the place where you dug a hole eighty foot into the ground, you dug it out, you poured concrete in and they build a high rise. Because in Chicago the foundation is roughly eighty to a hundred feet under. Eighty, ninety feet ’til you get to bedrock, and some of that is shale before you get to bedrock. All of them are built on caissons. I was involved in the caisson field, so I was.
With the caissons, winter time you were down there, at least you were warm. You never thought of it that way? To get down there was, it was three people. You had a guy what they call pulling a head, he worked the taking up and down in the skip, and you had another guy emptying and you were the guy that was down below pulling it out. Sometimes two people working the same place, the circumference would be bigger, say six foot in circumference. They’d lower you down on the skip. You had spades that’d open your head up, steam shovels, yeah. Work was work. Later I was an ironworker, the same as most of the others. I worked the heights, connecting, putting in bolts, and the usual. Anything that applies to itI played music for a hobby. That was my night off, a good old blast of music. I had a feeling that the music was far more appreciated in this country than it was in Ireland, and only for this country our music would have gone to the flaming dogs.
I went back to Ireland in 1960, and I went to London, again, and that’s when I seen the revolutionizing of our music. When I was there in the late ’40s and the early ’50s you know, going in and out, I had brothers in London and you went in for the holidays and you couldn’t play here and you couldn’t play there. The police came in and put you out. And then when I went back in 1960, the whole thing had changed. They were paying you to play. For the simple reason, what the whole thing came out of was the hootenanny, Pete Seeger and them crowd, the folk revival, because when I was in New York in ’54 and ’55 I used to go down to the Village, oh yes, I’d see Pete Seeger and all them crowd, and them jamming away in the old style. I did enjoy it because it was nearer to my heart, than the modern. I took the flute down a few times but I had prominent teeth at the time and I couldn’t knock the same tone out of the flute, you know what I mean, until I got dentures in and that.
My philosophy in the work field was one hand for yourself and the other hand for the corporation, to be precise, and take it or leave it. If you couldn’t cut it as we say, didn’t do enough, they send you down the road and that was all right too. You got another job. Some of them that’s all they wanted to talk about was work — good work, bad work, tell the boss to shove it, and kiss my arse. I was very polite. You didn’t owe your soul to the company store. Family and music, and you took the finer things in life to heart, so you did. Of course work was very important too, put bread on the table too.
Now I’ve come to the latter end of my career. I’m not too bad, I’m keeping away from the feckin’ undertaker. He hasn’t my measurement taken yet!
Pauline: The man upstairs is going to leave us for a long time! We’ll have a lot of stories and fun and laughter and music.
Kevin: If you die, you die, and if you don’t, you don’t. Live as long as you can and die when you can’t help it. é
Éirways is an independent print-only magazine about Ireland, its culture, and its people at home and around the world. We bring passion and craft to a print-only publication that seeks to broaden perspectives on Ireland and the Irish diaspora. Edited by Kieran O’Hare.
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