Musical history of Danny Boy

a famous Irish lament is about saying goodbye to a loved one, knowing that maybe you might never see him again.

but the actual history of the song is a bit more complicated: like a lot of songs that have their roots in tradition, it sort of evolved to the present version:

 

A lot of us remember that it was the theme song for the Danny Thomas Show, aka Make Room for Daddy, a 1950s sit com.

the irony? Danny Thomas was not Irish, but an Arab: A Catholic Lebanese American.

But for doctors and parents of children suffering from cancer, his best known role was as the one who was behind St Jude's Children's hospital.

From Wikipedia:

As a "starving actor", Thomas had made a vow: If he found success, he would open a shrine dedicated to St. Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint of hopeless causes. After becoming a successful actor in the early 1950s...to help raise funds to build St. Jude Children's Research Hospital....With help from Dr. Lemuel Diggs and close friend Anthony Abraham, an auto magnate in Miami, Florida, Thomas founded the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1962.

Why Memphis? His original idea was to put the hospital in California where he worked, but doctors pointed out the lack of such hospitals in the rural South of the USA... 

A lot of us are old enough to remember when childhood leukemia was a death sentence. And then a breakthrough occured: a miracle.

Smithsonian magazine has the story of the hospital and one of the men behind the breakthrough: Don Pinkel.

Pinkel recruited the staff. He devised the protocols. He forged the relationships. He coaxed the drugs from the pharmaceutical companies. He wheedled the grant monies from the federal agencies. In its first years, he kept St. Jude afloat, though it had few success stories and sometimes could barely make payroll. “Don had a clear and noble vision,” said Simone, “and he created a culture of daring.” Perhaps most important, it was Pinkel who decided, from the outset, to put the conquest of ALL(Leukemia) at the heart of the enterprise.

Said Simone, “Don’s the one who realized: It doesn’t do any good to extend the lives of those kids by a few months. You have to go for broke. You have to go for the total cure.” And he did. In 1970, just eight years into his tenure at St. Jude, Pinkel was able to make an extraordinary pronouncement: Childhood leukemia, he said, “can no longer be considered an incurable disease.”

Read the whole article (and don't forget to have a handkerchief handy).