Morton Downey
photo: uncredited · public domain ↗John Morton Downey was born in Wallingford, Connecticut, in 1901, son of the town's fire chief, and began singing in the choir of Most Holy Trinity Church; at six he earned a dollar at a minstrel show, money he later said "made a terrific impact on me." At eighteen he talked his way into Paul Whiteman's orchestra — "I looked like an unfrocked altar boy," he said of it — then worked resort stages abroad before radio made him a star. Billed "The Irish Nightingale" for a high, "heady" tenor an uninformed listener could mistake for a woman's, he recorded for Victor, Brunswick, Decca, and Columbia through the late 1920s and '30s, and was voted radio's Singer of the Year in 1932. He later fathered the television brawler Morton Downey Jr., who inherited his name and little else. The elder Downey didn't invent the stage-Irish tenor; he outlasted it.
No account has Downey naming Chauncey Olcott as an idol — the connection lives in the discography, not the interview. Olcott, a full generation earlier, was the reigning stage tenor of Irish-American sentimental theater: he co-wrote and starred in the 1912 show The Isle O' Dreams, and in 1913 made the first commercial recording of its centerpiece, "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling." Downey, working the same "creamy," high-timbred persona that earned him the billing "The Irish Nightingale," eventually cut that identical song for the Sears house label Silvertone — not a passing cover, but a return to the number that had defined the genre he built his career inside.
listen forOlcott's 1913 recording is pure footlights: an acoustic-era theater tenor pushing to fill a house with no microphone to help him, every phrase broad and evenly weighted, diction crisp enough to carry to the balcony. Downey's version, cut after radio and the microphone had remade popular singing, pulls the same melody in close — lighter, breathier, riding at the very top of his range in the "heady" timbre contemporaries said could pass for a woman's voice. Same tune, same words, but the gap between a stage voice and a broadcast voice is the whole story of what happened to the American tenor in fifteen years.
When TIME magazine profiled Downey in July 1944, at the height of his $250,000-a-year radio career, it did not describe him as an heir — it graded him. "The most popular Irish tenor in the U.S. since the great days of John McCormack," the magazine wrote, before adding that Downey "has no such fabulous voice as John McCormack's, either for the lyric subtleties of Mozart or the ripe Celtic emotionalism of Kathleen Mavourneen." No account has Downey citing McCormack himself; the comparison is the press's, not his — but it's the yardstick contemporaries reached for the moment his name came up.
listen forMcCormack's 1911 recording of "Kathleen Mavourneen," the ballad TIME named as his measuring stick, is built on a long, seamless legato line, each note placed with concert-hall control. Downey's 1929 "When They Sing 'The Wearin' of the Green'" reaches for the same homesick Irish sentiment but doesn't ask for that discipline — the phrases are shorter, the tone lighter, shaped for a three-minute radio spot rather than a recital hall. Set side by side, the two records are the difference between an opera-trained instrument and a pop tenor built to sell records off a jukebox.