John McCormack

Born in Ireland yet later an American citizen, tenor John McCormack delivered both popular and classical material and ranked among the era’s foremost concert attractions during the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, routinely filling the world’s largest halls while also ranking among the foremost recording artists of his time. Victor Records issued the bulk of his more than 600 sides between 1904 and 1942, and those discs are believed to have sold in excess of 200 million copies. Joel Whitburn’s Pop Memories 1890-1954 places McCormack twenty-third among the leading artists of that sixty-four-year stretch and seventh for the decade 1910-1919; the same volume ranks his World War I anthem “It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary” tenth among the period’s most successful releases.

McCormack entered the world in Athlone, Ireland, on 14 June 1884 as the son of mill worker Andrew McCormack and Hannah (Watson) McCormack. In 1896, at twelve, he earned a scholarship to Summerhill College in Sligo and remained there until graduating in 1902 at eighteen. Already determined on a vocal career, he joined Dublin’s Palestrina Choir at the Pro-Cathedral, where the choir-master offered encouragement. The following year he competed at the Feis Ceoil, Ireland’s national music festival, and captured the gold medal in the tenor category. He made his initial journey to America in 1904 and performed at the St. Louis World’s Fair; later that year he reached London and cut his earliest discs for Edison, Edison Bell, and Gramophone & Typewriter. A friend’s recommendation brought him to Italian vocal coach Vincenzo Sabatini, who accepted him as a pupil; McCormack therefore departed for Milan early in 1905 and spent most of the year studying there. By the next winter Sabatini declared him prepared, and on 13 January 1906 he made his operatic debut with the Teatro Chiabrero company in Savona, appearing in L’Amico Fritz. Back in Britain he established himself in London, secured engagements, and signed a six-year contract with Odeon Records. Although some observers later suggested he shifted from classical to popular repertoire, biographer Gordon T. Ledbetter notes in The Great Irish Tenor that even these early sessions mixed material, the largest portion consisting of the Irish ballads for which he became best known.

The Royal Opera engaged him in 1907; his Covent Garden debut occurred on 15 October of that year as Turiddu in Cavalleria Rusticana, making him, at twenty-three, the youngest tenor to undertake a principal role with the company. From 1908 onward he appeared on the more prestigious summer schedule and continued at Covent Garden until the opera suspended performances at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. That hiatus allowed him, in 1909, to accept a three-year contract from American impresario Oscar Hammerstein—grandfather of the later Broadway lyricist and librettist—to join the Manhattan Opera Company, the Metropolitan’s rival. He debuted at the Manhattan Opera House on 10 November 1909 in Traviata and gave his first U.S. recital eight days later at the same venue. When Hammerstein sold his interests to the Metropolitan the following year, the Manhattan company became the Philadelphia-Chicago Opera Company; McCormack honored his contract with appearances across the United States and made his Metropolitan debut in New York on 29 November 1910.

On 10 February 1910 Victor Records purchased his Odeon contract for £2,000 and tendered a new twenty-eight-year agreement that included a $10,000 advance and a ten-percent royalty. The investment proved immediately profitable. Whitburn credits McCormack with five hits in 1910, beginning with a re-recording of the Irish ballad “Killarney” in May; five more followed in 1911, two of which—“I’m Falling in Love With Someone” from Victor Herbert’s Naughty Marietta and “Mother Machree” from Chauncey Olcott’s Barry of Ballymore—Whitburn estimates would have topped the charts had weekly lists existed. In autumn 1911 McCormack toured Australia in opera, yet upon returning to the United States in early 1912 he declared his intention to concentrate on concerts. In a later interview he remarked, “I am the world’s worst actor,” echoing critics who admired his singing but faulted his stagecraft. While many opera singers act poorly, McCormack simply disliked the medium and preferred appearing alone before an audience; he therefore embarked on thirty-four American concerts before returning to Covent Garden for the summer season. During 1912-1913 he gave sixty-seven recitals, appeared in twelve operas, and, according to Whitburn, scored five additional record successes, after which he again performed at Covent Garden, toured Australia, and undertook another American journey that ran from October 1913 through March 1914.

That already demanding itinerary grew still heavier in subsequent seasons: ninety-five concerts in 1914-1915, eighty-five (plus two operas) in 1915-1916, roughly eighty in 1916-1917, eighty-eight (plus five operas) in 1917-1918, and approximately ninety (plus two operas) in 1918-1919—all before commercial aviation or the interstate highway system existed. Few artists matched McCormack’s popularity in those pre-radio and pre-television years, when performers lacked amplification. He repeatedly filled New York’s 5,000-seat Hippodrome beyond capacity, with an additional thousand seats placed onstage around him and his accompanist and another thousand standing patrons, sometimes for multiple engagements per season. Recordings continued to thrive as well. Whitburn tallies six hits in 1914; seven in 1915, led by the year’s biggest seller, “It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary”; seven in 1916, two of them—“Somewhere a Voice Is Calling” and “The Sunshine of Your Smile”—reaching number one; seven in 1917, including two further chart-toppers, “The Star-Spangled Banner” (following American entry into World War I) and “Send Me Away With a Smile”; four in 1918; and four more in 1919. His 1918 earnings alone are estimated at $300,000, equivalent to more than $3.5 million in 2003 dollars.

McCormack applied for American citizenship in April 1914 and was naturalized in June 1919. Apart from a throat ailment that sidelined him from spring through autumn 1922, he sustained his heavy schedule of concerts and recordings through the early 1920s, finally abandoning opera altogether in 1923. Although this decision reinforced the perception of a classical-to-popular transition, Ledbetter observes that McCormack continued to program substantial “serious” works in recital while his discs leaned heavily toward popular songs, thereby sustaining sales. Whitburn records another twenty-three hits during the 1920s, among them a number-one success with Irving Berlin’s “All Alone,” which McCormack introduced during a 1924 radio tribute to the composer.

Beginning with the 1925-1926 season he reduced his concert load to roughly fifty appearances annually, yet travel remained extensive; in 1926 he visited Japan and China. Eight weeks of filming in Hollywood in 1929 brought $500,000 and marked his debut feature, Song o’ My Heart; he appeared in only one other motion picture, the 1937 British production Wings of the Morning, England’s first Technicolor feature. As his voice declined in the 1930s he performed less frequently and announced his retirement at a March 1937 concert in Buffalo, New York, though he subsequently undertook a British tour that concluded on 27 November 1938. Less than a year later he returned to the stage to raise funds for the Red Cross at the outset of World War II, giving a final concert on 5 May 1940. Even afterward he continued recording until his last session on 10 September 1942, then retired to his estate outside Dublin, where he died of pneumonia on 16 September 1945 at age sixty-one.

Despite his extraordinary commercial success, McCormack drew critical ambivalence because he refused to limit himself to either classical or popular spheres. In later terminology he would be termed a “classical crossover” artist; consequently, classical listeners often viewed him as a defector while popular-music audiences, particularly later in his career and after his death, found him more formal than, for example, Bing Crosby and therefore not truly a pop performer. Much of his sentimental-ballad, operetta, and art-song repertoire also gradually migrated into the classical canon. Moreover, because most of his finest recordings date from the pre-1925 acoustic era, they have remained less continuously available than those of artists whose peaks occurred a decade or two later. In the compact-disc era, however, numerous reissues have reaffirmed the qualities the Feis Ceoil judges recognized in 1903: an extraordinary depth of feeling and purity of tone in a voice that successive generations have found unforgettable.