Christendom College history professor Dr. Christopher Shannon returned to his native Rochester, New York, this month to perform “A Little Slip of Heaven: Songs and Stories of the Rochester Irish, from Baby Boom to Baby Bust.” The program, which presented the Irish history of Rochester, sold out, with residents packing into a theater to hear Shannon’s original songs and stories about Rochester’s old Tenth Ward in the decades following World War II.
Shannon, who is an associate professor of history at Christendom, has taught and written extensively on Irish and American history, including the book Bowery to Broadway: The American Irish in Classic Hollywood Cinema. “A Little Slip of Heaven” is Shannon’s love letter to his native Rochester, where he grew up surrounded by Irish American families like his own.
“Living in the city, being in Catholic schools, and the church and the broader neighborhood, that was my experience of being Irish Catholic,” said Shannon in an interview with the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle. “That’s what I’m trying to capture in the songs.”
Throughout the show, Shannon performed a number of original songs based on traditional Irish melodies, telling the Irish history of Rochester after World War II.
Throughout the show, Shannon performed a number of original songs based on traditional Irish melodies, singing stories of the “Little Irish” football team of Aquinas Institute and the impact of national Irish figures such as John F. Kennedy and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. His show, instead of focusing on the Irish culture in Ireland, presented a more distinctly Irish American story: a life rooted in the ethnic diversity of the American city rather than the cultural homogeneity of the Irish countryside, and one characterized by dramatic change rather than timeless tradition.
Shannon, who previously performed versions of “A Little Slip of Heaven” around Rochester, brought all these stories and more to life for a night, enchanting the sold-out crowd in his native city. While the Rochester of Shannon’s childhood is different now, the old ways stayed alive in his music, capturing the life and times of an Irish American enclave within the city.
The author of many books, including the acclaimed American Pilgrimage: A Historical Journey Through Catholic Life in a New World, Shannon is currently hard at work at his next book, a biography of Rochester’s musical duo, The Dady Brothers. His other books include Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in Modern American Social Thought (Johns Hopkins, 1996), Bowery to Broadway: The American Irish in Classic Hollywood Cinema (University of Scranton Press, 2010), and with Christopher O. Blum, The Past as Pilgrimage: Narrative, Tradition and the Renewal of Catholic History (Christendom Press, 2014).