See You at the Hall: Boston's Golden Era of Irish Music and Dance (review) (2006)

Reviewed by: See You at the Hall: Boston’s Golden Era of Irish Music and Dance Sally K. Sommers Smith See You at the Hall: Boston’s Golden Era of Irish Music and Dance, by Susan Gedutis , pp. 252. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004. $27 (cloth). Although Irish music has been played and enjoyed in Boston since the first immigrant communities were established in the city, the era just after World War II produced the most memorable music venues in a small section of Boston's Roxbury neighborhood called Dudley Square, where Irish dance [End Page 149] bands performed the traditional music of Ireland—as well as popular American and Irish-American tunes—to the delight of thousands. Dances, held several times a week, afforded the Irish communities of the Boston area an opportunity to meet, talk, dance, and in some way recreate the feeling of home. Susan Gedutis, a Boston-area Irish musician and editor, has written a definitive guide to the era of the Dudley Square dance halls in See You at the Hall: Boston's Golden Era of Irish Music and Dance. Gedutis devotes most of her attention to the heyday of the dance hall era in Boston, which lasted from the 1940s until its slow decline in the 1960s. Thursday ("maid's night out") and Saturday night dances in the Dudley Square halls would sometimes last into the wee hours. Musicians became famous on Dudley Street, and several of them at least attempted to make a living making music at the dance halls, at weddings and other private gatherings, and sometimes, in the market for Irish recordings. This heady era lasted for more than two decades, but eventually succumbed to the combined forces of musical change and an aging clientele. As Irish families began to be established, young parents found no time for the dance hall. The new Irish immigrants were enamored of more recent musical styles, and the crowds for the dance bands shrunk. Out of the decline of the dance halls on Dudley Street came a different realization of the place and performance of Irish music in Boston. Dance bands gave way to show bands, whose demise, in turn, provided fertile ground for the establishment of the Boston chapter of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, which now boasts the largest membership of any CCÉ chapter in the world. Three familiar names seem to be at the center of each new permutation or setting of the Boston music world: Joe Derrane, Larry Reynolds, and Joe Joyce. These master musicians—now in their seventies—still thrive at the heart of Boston's Irish music community, and act as living repositories of the history of the music and its power to create and maintain continuity with the "sounds of home." Gedutis draws extensively on the oral histories of musicians in the dance bands that performed at the Dudley Square halls; she uses their reminiscences often, and well. Her book is episodic, rather than linear, and the story jumps back and forth between Boston and Ireland, between one era and the next. But this makes for a lively read, one that after a while takes on the distinctive swing and lift of a jig set. And sometimes Gedutis will throw her narrative to the winds in order to include a good story, such as the tale of Joe Joyce's stowaway trip by cruise ship to Cobh—a story that does nothing to advance her historical survey, but which is such a great improbable tale that the reader not only pardons, but welcomes, its inclusion. A limited study such as this must omit some parts of the mix. Gedutis mentions, but does not examine, the interplay between the Irish musicians and [End Page 150] immigrants who populated Dudley Street and the musicians and dance hall crowds in the same area who hailed from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Cape Breton music and dance have their own rich history in "The Boston States," and Gedutis's short section on the outstanding fiddler Bill Lamey and his organization of dances at the Rose Croix Hall in Dudley Square only whets the appetite for a more thorough treatment of the role of the...