Danny Cassidy

Jazz, n., a name given to African-American music; excitement, passion, enthusiasm

Teas (pron. j’ass, chass), n., heat, passion, excitement, ardor, enthusiasm

We lost Danny Cassidy to cancer a few weeks ago.  There were tantalizing details in his obituary.  You might not have guessed that this guy, this jazzbo (Teasbach, a person of animal spirits, exuberance) had an Ivy League education, or that he had spent years as a professional musician, or that he had produced an Emmy-nominated documentary on the Troubles.  His cronies (Comh-roghna,  fellow chosen-ones) came out to pay him high tribute for his life’s work teaching, writing, and organizing in the Mission District. 

Jazz was perhaps his favorite word.  “Jazz!”  he enunciated like a preacher or a hustler, and you got the word, you knew it, as he riffed his way through the history and context, its derivation in the Irish language, about how it jumped around the sandlots of the Mission District of the 1910s and became a vulgar expression that was grafted on to the complex, exuberant music emerging in Negro joints in the great cities of America. 

As the co-director of the Irish Studies program at the New College, he championed language and Irish studies of the crossroads, and made an extraordinary contribution to American language with his award-winning book published last year, How the Irish Invented Slang . 

He introduced the book with his typical flourish.  “ The Irish language in America is a lost, living tongue, hidden beneath quirky (corr-chaoí, odd-mannered, odd-shaped) phonetic orthographic overcoats and mangled American pronunciations. Irish words and phrases are scattered all across American language, regional and class dialects, colloquialism, slang, and specialized jargons like gambling, in the same way Irish-Americans have been scattered across the crossroads of North America for five hundred years.”

These were the words of “uncertain origin”, which the Anglo-Saxons would not acknowledge had probably come from the Irish street (which were most slum streets in 1900 America) - punchy, vulgar street words.  You can imagine their fluent delivery by some pale urchin in Brooklyn, a lost whore in Philly, a muscle guy in Southie. 

Journalist Alexander Cockburn loved the book and published it.  “Imagine old, sunken roads re-surfaced on our maps. Imagine an x-ray of the American language, its sinews and its muscles. This is what Dan Cassidy gave us. He laid out what the Irish in their revels, their loves and hates, their exuberant, often desperate battle with the New World, have given America in the way we all speak and read and write.”

In a New York Times interview last year, Danny explained that “even growing up around it, little shards of the language stayed alive in our mouths and came out as slang”;  terms like “Snazzy” (which) comes from “snasach,” which means polished, glossy or elegant. The word “scram” comes from “scaraim,” meaning “I get away.” The word “swell” comes from “sóúil,” meaning luxurious, rich and prosperous, and “sucker” comes from “sách úr,” or, loosely, fat cat.”

New York writer Peter Quinn, author of Banished Children of Eve, considered Danny “a very dear friend”.  He says, “I think the book’s an absolute masterpiece”, combining “scholarship and intuition”.  He had the street and he had the language.”  Danny picked up the history of the fading street culture,  “the old parish structure, the language…the Brooklyn accent are gone…we thought it’d be there forever”. 

How this got started was that Danny was willed an old copy of Focloir Póca, an Irish dictionary, by Kevin O’Dowd, an old friend who died.  He didn’t know what to make of the book, but his wife urged him to read it, and so he left by his bedside and read a word a night.   Apparently, something stirred in the deep chambers of his sleeping brain.   Traces of childhood lore. 

He spoke about the memory of a strange word relatives used to use to describe his quiet, taciturn Pop.  He was called a ‘boliver’.  It was one of those words adults used that was always there and unquestioned.  Later he found the word in his Irish dictionary, balbhan, which means ‘a silent or a mute person’, and he just knew that it was one and the same.  He wrote “the Irish words were like the whisper of sanas (a hint, a whisper, secret knowledge) in my ear”.   

Cockburn:  “Why did Danny suddenly see what no one had seen before, that those Irish words saturate the American language? He saw, because he felt in his bones and sinews the nineteenth-century Irish emigrants’ world, of the slum, the railroad, the shipyard, the gambling hall, the carny circus tents, the gangs. So Cassidy rose up and threw this world in the face of the great lexicographers and etymologists.”

Margaret McPeake, Danny’s colleague from the New College Irish Studies program, is still shaken at the loss of her friend.  “It's hard to imagine the world without him…Danny represented so much for so many.”  He cared deeply about the isolation of Middle American and inner city youths with no sense of their own cultural birthright.  As Margaret sees it, “reconnecting those students with their own stories” was his abiding passion as a teacher.    As a city man he alighted on the notion of crossroads to talk about Irish in the city, where heat and light and crowds.  Margaret says, "He needed the streets of San Francisco to keep him grounded".  Together they built the fabulous Crossroads Festival to keep alive family and neighborhood histories, unrecognized masters like Seamus Moriarty, and an eclectic variety of academic scholarship of the first order. 

McPeake and Hillary Flynn will continue the wonderful Crossroads Festival and continue to support culture and create space in tribute to Danny's life.  In the end, to have his life’s work so well received, “to have his insights taken to heart...both professionally and personally” was a great source of pride and satisfaction for him”.  Where is the energy to continue this going to come from?  Who else is going to help fill the void left by Danny Cassidy’s death?