Dan Kildare - A Supplement and Update to Tim Brooks's "Lost Sounds" Chapter 22

November 2023

This was the first time I suggested a piece for Frederick A. Brodie to consider for Rag of the Week - thank you, Fred! In the past, it's always Fred making a statement like "Nothing is known of the composer of this piece" or something of the kind that has gotten me to dig into the composers like Elmer Olson, W.P. Barnett, E.E. Wilson, Garfield Wilson, etc., etc. This time it was somebody else making such a statement -- specifically, I was posting Eric S. Marchese's writeup of the Orange County Ragtime Society concert at the Nixon Library on November 12, which I put up on the RagFest webpages at http://ragfest.com/ocrs_archives/2023_november.html and in that writeup Eric indicated about the fox-trot "Doctor Brown" (Fred Irvin, 1914) that he'd played "This great piece is unique, and can perhaps be deemed a "one-hit wonder" as we have no other rags by composer Irvin and little information about him." As those who read these Rag-of-the-Week posts, you know them's fightin' words to me! So I dug into Fred Irvin and was rewarded with finding another fascinating character! One of the first steps is always to peruse the Catalog of Copyright Entries to see what compositions were actually registered for copyright, and in the process which of them was published (and registered - the small-time publishers frequently never bothered to do that). I found Irvin had published three instrumentals in 1914 - "Doctor Brown", the fox-trot, "Some Chocolate Drops", a slightly peculiar one-step co-written with Will Vodery (available at https://digitalcollections-baylor.quartexcollections.com/... ), and "The Congo Tongo", which is by Irvin and Dan Kildare, but I could not find it anywhere on line. But there is an image of a card from a card catalog of the Reference Sheet Music Collection at the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library that Google turned up that looks like this:

I contacted the Library and they promptly found the sheet in the collection and since it is in the public domain they had no issue with providing a scan, and that's what Fred has posted here. A big thank-you to the Library for this!

Regarding Irvin's co-composer on "The Congo Tongo", Dan Kildare (1879-1920), I had some vague memory about his coming to a sticky end, and it took some digging to recall the complete discussion of Kildare's fascinating career in Tim Brooks's essential book "Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry 1890-1919" (University of Illinois Press, 2004), chapter 22, pp. 299-320, from which this nice version of Kildare's passport application photo comes:

That chapter in Lost Sounds in turn is a slightly extended version of the article Brooks had written with Howard Rye in the UK about Kildare that was published in Storyville 1996/7. Rye had had access to a lot of the sources in England that are relatively hard for us in the US to access (especially back in the 1990s), which of course was essential to completing the story of Kildare's years in the UK.

Still if there's one thing we've learned in the last decade or so is that as more and more records are constantly being scanned and uploaded to the web, it really pays to reinvestigate the figures of interest to us periodically. The most obvious example of that, I think, is Bryan Cather's discovery of the fact that Scott Joplin had indeed actually married Lottie, when Ed Berlin's determined previous efforts had never turned that up. In the present case, I did turn up one salient fact about Dan Kildare that it seems Rye and Brooks missed. They say that Kildare was married twice: first to Ena with whom Dan had his daughter Francis [sic -- I always thought that the girl's name version of the spelling would be Frances -- born circa 1906], then to Mary Rose Frances Fink, who was a widow who had inherited from her late husband a pub in London. This was the woman who Kildare murdered in 1920 before turning the gun on himself. One might also note the fact that Kildare seems almost to materialize out of nowhere, although he was born in Jamaica in 1879 and seems to have come to the United States around 1895 (based only on the fact that Ena seems to have told the census enumerator in 1915 that Dan had come to this country about 20 years ago), he appears in New York around 1909. Now, the earliest appearance of Kildare in a document cited by Brooks is mentions of Kildare with J.W. Gorman's Alabama Troubadours troupe in 1900 and 1901, such as this item from The Indianapolis Freeman from November 3, 1900 (p. 5, column 2):

One thing becomes clear as one looks at the mentions of this company around 1900 is that they toured the northeast, up into Canada. In fact, advertisements for the company trying to hire new talent in the Freeman mention that they are "the cream of [the] cream of [Black] shows in the East" and that Gorman's office was in Boston. Another article in a newspaper in Maine says that the owners of the show are "New England and Western Park Amusement" and that they tour from the state of Maine all the way to as far west as Pittsburgh, PA. This all seems consistent with what I've found, which is that around 1900 Kildare was based in the Boston area. We find him, very recognizable due to his age -- ok, he said on 17 Dec 1900 that he was 22 when actually he would not have his 22nd birthday for a little less than a month, so he rounded - pretty close to 22 -- and that he said he was born in Jamaica, and most importantly that his occupation was "musical director". He married Mary L. Patenaude of Lowell, MA on that date, in Boston. The interracial nature of their union was evidently unusual enough at the time that the races of the groom and bride were noted explicitly, when there is no other such note on the rest of the page.

The marriage was noted in the Boston paper (Boston Globe, December 18, 1900):

Daniel and Mary L. (the middle name was something like Leonie) had a child born on 17 September 1901 in Peabody, MA, who they named after Daniel's father George and gave him his father's name for a middle name, hence George Daniel Kildare. The sets of ditto marks are indicating that, first, the child was born in Peabody, and the second that that is the residence of the child's parents.

Unfortunately, the child passed away on Christmas Eve, 24 December 1901 in the city of Lowell, MA, of "General Debility".

Kildare visited Jamaica, perhaps to visit with family (?), returning to Boston on 19 August 1903, on which occasion he said he was married and that his final destination was home to Lowell, MA. The 1904 Lowell directory says that Daniel Kildare has "removed to Boston".

By the 1910 census, Kildare's first wife is working as a live-in servant to a small family headed by a young woman named Thayer in an apartment on Beacon Street in Brookline, MA, and she tells the enumerator that she has been married for 9 years, presumably meaning the absent Daniel, and that she is mother of one child, no longer living. Interestingly, she visits Jamaica herself in 1915, returning to New York on April 21. Here she lists her closest relative as a sister who lives in Lowell, and it looks like she told the person taking down the information that she was married, but someone has written on top of the "M" a "Wd", meaning "widowed". I'm not sure that she exactly said that her husband was dead, though maybe to her he was. In fact, at that time he had very recently left New York to sail to London, where he would live the remaining five years of his life.

Leonie Kildare moved back to Lowell, where her sister Georgia lived as well as her father Noe Patenaude, and she appears in the 1917 Lowell city directory. But she passed away 17 May 1917. She is buried along with her parents and her sister in Chelmsford, MA:

To return to Dan Kildare himself for a moment, it is a little difficult to find the entry in the New York State census of 1915 that Brooks and Rye referred to, because the OCR had a lot of trouble with the sloppy handwriting of the enumerator, but here it is:

One is forced to begin to wonder whether or not Dan Kildare bothered to divorce his first two wives, the Massachusetts one and the New York one, before marrying Mrs. Fink in London. I have not been able to find divorce records of either.

I had another thought about this. In discussing Ena "Kildear" [sic - see the 1915 census excerpt above], Brooks writes "Three years later [1918, that is], when Dan married again in England, he described himself as a "widower," but it seems more likely that he and Ena divorced, as he named her and his daughter in his will two years after that." ("Lost Sounds", p. 310.) Another explanation might be that Ena and Dan never were actually married, perhaps because he did not get a divorce from Leonie, back in Massachusetts (any more than Dan's colleague in the Clef Club before 1914 James Reese Europe could marry the mother of his son James Reese Europe, Jr., because he was married to Willie.) Perhaps he learned of Leonie's passing in 1917 while he was in England and thus felt free to marry Mrs. Fink as a widower, in 1918. This scenario would fit with the fact that Leonie went to her grave as "Leonie Kildare" - see the tombstone pictured above. Although this version still does not paint Dan in a particularly flattering light, he would not be a serial bigamist, anyway. And he did think of his child when he, chillingly enough, made out his will a couple days before he confronted his wife and her sister at the pub in London.

To complete this supplement to Brooks's chapter about Kildare, here are some of the articles covering the fatal incident as they appeared in the newspapers. As Brooks observes, the coverage in the US press was relatively low-key, indicating that Kildare was almost forgotten here by 1920, him having spent the preceding five years in the UK. (New York Age, June 26, 1920). Note that the one thing that hadn't reached the States yet was the fact that the nurse was only wounded, not killed - she recovered after a stay "in hospital", as the British phrase it.

Naturally, the accounts were much more detailed in the London papers. (The People, June 27, 1920):

Closer to the date of the event, the accounts were slightly more confused (The Evening Standard, Tuesday, June 22, 1920). This one has a headshot of the last Mrs. Kildare:

One more. This is from The Daily Telegraph, Thursday, June 24, 1920: