At the turn of the 20th century, he was renowned around the world as the soul of Ireland, the very epitome of top-o’-the-mornin’ Irishness. Yet Chauncey Olcott, a son of Buffalo and Lockport, did not set foot in the Emerald Isle until he was 40 years old.
John Chancellor Olcott, who would grow up to write and popularize such enduring standards as “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling”, “Mother Machree” and “My Wild Irish Rose,” was born in Buffalo in 1858, far from Ireland, at least geographically. His mother, Peggy Doyle Olcott, was born in County Cork and raised in a canal worker’s log shack in Lockport; his father, Mellen Whitney Olcott, was a rakish canalboat owner and horseplayer descended from a long line of Yankee bluebloods. Chauncey grew up steeped in Irishness on the one hand, spending his summers with his maternal grandparents in that Lockport shanty on West Genesee Street—and, on the other, from his father he learned the ways of a jaunty, debonair man-about-town.
And that voice… even as a young boy, Chauncey Olcott sang like an angel. At age 4, he sang at St. Michael’s in Buffalo. He performed Irish ballads at the Washington Hose firehouse in Lockport. When he was 11, he sang before a large crowd at Fourth of July festivities at Franklin Square. He absorbed more of the showbiz spirit from hanging around the saloon his father owned at the corner of Canal and State in Buffalo’s raucous Canal District.
Tragedy upended life for young Chauncey. His grandfather in Lockport drowned in the canal, and a few years later, when Chauncey was about 12, his father died in New York City. But his mother, Peggy, persevered. She ran her own saloon on Batavia Street (today’s Broadway Street). Soon enough, she remarried and wound up owning tugboats in the Buffalo Harbor. By then Chauncey knew he wanted to be an actor and, with his fine tenor, a singer. But Peggy believed it to be too precarious a way to make a living; she insisted that her 17-year-old boy learn the tugboat trade, maybe skipper his own boat one day. For now, though, he apprenticed as a coal shoveler in the tug’s boiler room.
One day at the boiler, his shirt briefly caught fire… and that was that. Chauncey pleaded with his mother to let him leave the lake. She relented, but not before helping him buy a hotel and tavern to run in Hornellsville (as Hornell was then called), where he could perform and, in case his stage career fell through, still make a living as an innkeeper.
But within months, Chauncey was discovered by none other than Billy Emerson, an Irish-American performer famous for his blackface minstrelsy at the height of that unfortunate genre’s long spell of popularity. Chauncey joined Emerson’s troupe in Chicago and toured North America and London, where the Prince of Wales invited him to visit his private box. Back in the U.S., he managed and performed at a theater in San Francisco. But despite his success as a minstrel performer, he yearned for a career in the legitimate theater.
He got his break in 1886, when Lillian Russell, the biggest star of the era, spotted the handsome, rakish, 28-year-old performer at a minstrel show. She hired him to play opposite her in a comic opera in New York. That made Chauncey Olcott a sensation, despite — or, perhaps, because of — the scandal that followed his firing by Russell’s producer husband because of her romantic pursuit of Olcott. He went on to starring roles in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in New York and a comic opera in London — his first role as an Irishman.
Over the next 30 years, success followed success for Olcott: a series of roles as a dashing Irish tenor and romantic lead that challenged the prevailing stereotype of Irishmen as drunks, leprechauns or raging fistfighters; dinners with presidents, a long and loving marriage to his second wife, Rita O’Donovan, whose biography of her late husband, “Song in His Heart,” provides many of the details of his life that we know today.
By the time he died in 1932, Chuancey Olcott had established so much of the beloved sentimental groundwork that has come to be embraced as “Irish.” Yet proud as he was to be a son of Ireland, he was just as surely a son of Buffalo, Lockport and the Erie Canal.
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Cast (in order of appearance):
Chauncey Olcott: Michael Starzynski
Tugboat deckhand: Jeff Z. Klein
Margaret Doyle Olcott: Darleen Pickering-Hummert
Narrator: Susan Banks
Sound recording: Brendan TK
Sound editing: Michael Peters
Excerpt from “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” sung by Chauncey Olcott (Columbia Records, 1913); composer: Ernest R. Ball; lyricists: Chauncey Olcott & George Graff; Audio. https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-648395/
Produced by the Niagara Frontier Heritage Project
Written by Jeff Z. Klein
Associate producer: Karl-Eric Reif
Special thanks to:
Kathryn Larsen, vice president, content distribution, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
S.J. Velasquez, director of audio strategy, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
Jerry Urban, senior radio broadcast engineer
Common Council Member Mitchell P. Nowakowski and the City of Buffalo for their generous support.
Written by Jeff Z. Klein (Niagara Frontier Heritage Project)