THE SOUTH SIDE — Terry McEldowney is still singing it.
McEldowney’s legendary neighborhood anthem, “South Side Irish,” has charmed crowds into shouting the lyrics, banging on tables and belching pints of Guinness, from South Side pubs and Irish weddings to maybe even the fifth floor of City Hall.
“It’s a song about us, our parishes, where we come from in Ireland, where we come from here,” McEldowney said. “So best to get a drink and grab onto the places you know.”
The seriously Irish tune — which sold over 150,000 records and made McEldowney his own little pot of gold— turns 40 years old ahead of St. Patrick Day Sunday.
McEldowney, 77, a perennial performer and raunchy wisecracker at Irish pub Reilly’s Daughter, gets his own float in the South Side Irish Parade traveling through Beverly and Morgan Park.
“He’s the guy with the neighborhood’s fight song,” said Skinny Sheahan, a former right-hand man to Mayor Richard M. Daley. “All the kids around here learned the words in basements of churches. They grow up and sing it at packed bars. It’s a rite of passage.”
A Reilly’s regular wearing a White Sox shirt came up to shake McEldowney’s hand Thursday at the bar, 4010 W. 111th St. in suburban Oak Lawn, across the street from Chicago’s Mount Greenwood neighborhood.
“I’ve heard that song at least a hundred times,” the fan said.
“Lucky you,” McEldowney said back.
The Go-Go White Sox
Whether you live in “Bridgeport to Beverly from Midway to South Shore,” your parents came from “Mayo, from Cork and Donegal,” or your parish was “Sabina, St. Kilian’s and St. Gall, St. Leo, Visitation, Little Flower and the rest,” it’s the last line of “South Side Irish” that really gets the people going.
“When it comes to baseball, we have two favorite clubs,” McEldowney sings. “The Go-Go White Sox … and whoever plays the Cubs.”
McEldowney thought the Cubs kicker would be a “rip-roaring success” the night in 1984 when the Irish Choir he sang with — featuring Tom Walsh and Tom Black — wrote the song after a few drinks in Tom Walsh’s basement in suburban Orland Park. They were inspired by the South Side Irish Parade and the South Side Irish rugby team.
“We had this idea about the parishes, that we were going to put them all together. … In a couple hours we kinda just had the thing all knocked out,” McEldowney said. “We thought, if you’re South Side Irish, why wouldn’t you love it?”
Brendan O’Brien, the second-generation owner of Reilly’s Daughter, said he’s known the words to the song for as long as he could talk. He’s watched McEldowney belt it out seven or eight times in a row in front of packed crowds.
“He busts balls with a heart of gold,” O’Brien said. “People want to get called out in his crowd. They wave him down just for the chance of him f—king with them.”
Marianne Rowan Leslie, chairperson of the South Side Irish Parade, called McEldowney “something of a local raconteur.”
“The song embodies the neighborhood,” Leslie said. “Terry plays it and we sing it.”
O’Brien remembers the night someone pranked McEldowney by telling him his wife was in labor — to see if that would pull McEldowney off the stage he’s reluctant to leave.
“Terry is magnetic up there,” O’Brien said. “He’s the pulse of the pub.”
The Luck Of The Irish
O’Brien said his high school yearbook has “three pages of last names that just start with O’s.”
“I used to think the whole world was Ireland,” said McEldowney, who grew up near 79th Street and Damen Avenue. He worked for the Cook County’s Assessor’s Office before retiring.
In the ’70s, McEldowney gave his buddy Boz O’Brien a stack of Clancy Brothers albums that included an Irish folk song about a man who dared to marry “Reilly’s Daughter.”
O’Brien opened the pub by the same name in 1976. McEldowney, along with his music partner Whitey O’Day, blessed the place by performing atop pieces of plywood.
In the late ’80s, champion Bears quarterback Jim McMahon was a regular at the bar, where he hosted his offseason show, “The Bear Report.”
As McEldowney’s song swept the South Side, the pub got bigger. Reilly’s Daughter opened a second location at Midway Airport in 2001.
“I guess we got lucky,” Boz’s son Brendan O’Brien said.
Somewhere Over The Rainbow
The original pub’s success made Boz O’Brien reluctantly sell the place in 2003, his son said. But when the new owner Mike Quigley died in 2015, his children turned first to the O’Brien family to sell the place back.
Brendan O’Brien regularly pesters McEldowney, who now wears hearing aids, to come out and shake hands with neighborhood regulars at soda bread contests and Irish coffee tastings.
McEldowney will sometimes still perform his song once or twice, or seven or eight times.
But times have changed. The Irish don’t have the clout in Chicago politics they used to. The White Sox are coming off a 101-loss season. McEldowney’s former parish, Little Flower, closed in 1993.
The father of seven has lost two of his kids.
“Everyone coming in that door is 21. I’m 77,” McEldowney said. ” … For all my luck, I’ve been dealt a bad hand.”
Reilly’s Daughter is trying her best to keep the Irish spirit alive, O’Brien said. He thinks he’ll have no trouble talking McEldowney into performing “South Side Irish” again on St. Patrick’s Day.
“His voice still carries the room,” O’Brien said.
The song transports McEldowney back in time.
McEldowney stood up from the bar Thursday to take the stage for a light lunch crowd.
“This is the one place where I turn into a superstar,” McEldowney said. “I get that buzz from the crowd, grab them and say ‘Let’s go. What parish are you from? What neighborhood?’ We just start naming the streets.”
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