The Hurdy-Gurdy Man Was Heard and Abhorred on the Streets of Old Cincinnati

From "Cincinnati Post", April 17, 1906

By the time Cincinnatians enjoyed Donovan’s 1968 song, “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” the streets of our fair city had not seen a “hurdy gurdy man” for half a century. Before the First World War, wandering street musicians with requisite monkey companions were an everyday sight. An article in the Cincinnati Post [May 21, 1918] sounded the death knell for this once popular entertainment:

“The city license fee of $25 for street musicians has proved prohibitive to the hurdy-gurdies in these war days. The city clerk has not had an application yet this year.”

To be precise, the instrument carried about by these Italians—and the occupation was exclusive to Italians—was not, in fact, a hurdy-gurdy at all but a street organ, a very different sort of apparatus. The authentic hurdy-gurdy is a stringed instrument bowed by a resin-coated wheel. The street organ is a compact, portable, pneumatic organ keyed by a pinned cylinder or barrel, like that in a music box. Consequently, it is often called a barrel organ. The incorrect name arose from the fact that both instruments are operated by rotating a handle, so an organ grinder performs the same motions as a hurdy-gurdy player.

Organ grinders and their monkeys were common wherever Italian immigrant communities formed in the United States during the 1800s. Cincinnati’s Italian community grew quite substantially after the Civil War and was populous enough to support its own daily newspaper, the Italian Press.

At one time it was estimated that one of every 20 Italian men in New York City earned his living as an organ grinder. That statistic is amazing because there was general agreement that most people loathed the sound of a barrel organ. One wag quipped that organ grinders were paid to be silent, not to perform. That was certainly the sentiment in Cincinnati. The attitude of an Enquirer reporter [February 23, 1881] was typical:

“Every one has noticed the woman who vibrates from Fourth to Fifth, and from Fifth to Sixth street, on Vine, with her little instrument of torture, which is older than the oldest inhabitant, and has about as much music in it as the bray of a jackass. The poor creature, however, has become accustomed to the noise and bears her own intolerable racket with Christian fortitude. The general public are not blessed with her patience.”

The widespread intolerance for organ grinders was largely based on their reluctance to update their repertoire. One Cincinnati organ grinder told the Cincinnati Post [June 16, 1905] that it cost $100 to send his barrel organ back to Philadelphia every winter to be refurbished with a dozen new tunes. Most of his colleagues declined to freshen their selections and ground out the same old melodies for many tiresome years.

How much might you cough up, for example, if the ice cream man parked on your block and pumped out “Turkey In The Straw” until you paid him to leave? That’s why our ancestors dropped pennies into the monkey’s tin cup. And they dropped a lot of pennies. That organ grinder told the Post reporter he collected around five dollars every day, at a time when many Cincinnati factory workers earned three dollars a day or less.

Most newspaper articles about Cincinnati’s organ grinders reveal the prejudice many English-speaking residents held against Italian immigrants. The Enquirer [October 20, 1884] was not unusual in printing comments like this:

“The organ grinder is a very stale subject, generally stale enough to cause an ancient and fish-like odor to pervade his immediate vicinity. He is usually a brawny, dark-skinned Italian, with a congenital abhorrence for soap and water and a ceaseless misanthropic expression of countenance.”

For newspapers of the day, ethnic stereotypes were the fuel for comedy. Swarthy Italians, mangling English while pestering the citizenry with a barely domesticated monkey in tow, were frequent subjects for humorous articles.

In 1888, for example, a monkey named Spaghetti, who collected pennies for an organ grinder named Nicola Dacome, stole the helmet of police officer Jerry Collins and hauled it up to the top of a telegraph pole out in the West End. With Officer Collins hollering at the wayward simian, a crowd gathered and enjoyed the spectacle of the monkey blithely disintegrating the helmet while tossing fragments into the ever-reddening face of the distraught policeman.

From "Cincinnati Enquirer", March 25, 1895

A greyhound bounded from a yard in Avondale in 1895, curious about the monkey accompanying an organ grinder strolling through that hilltop community. The monkey, startled by the intrusion, clambered up a telegraph pole and refused to descend so long as the lean and loud dog was audible. The neighbors were treated to the sight of the organ grinder, his instrument strapped to his back, attempting to shinny up the telegraph pole while imploring his furry partner to descend.

Cincinnati guffawed over the divorce case of organ grinder John Ritzol and his wife Johanna in 1897. Mrs. Ritzol asked for alimony, but her husband testified that she had tossed most of his music cylinders into the canal, leaving only a few obsolete selections that would earn him no pennies. Judge Dan Wright told the divorcee that, because she had destroyed her ex-husband’s ability to earn the money for alimony, her application was denied.

Some incidents involving hurdy-gurdy monkeys were hardly comical to the participants. While an organ grinder ground away on Sixth Street in front of Volz’s restaurant in 1898, a man in the audience attempted to drop a nickel into the monkey’s cup but missed, the coin landing on the sidewalk. A waitress, Mamie Lally, picked it up, intending to put it in the cup, but the monkey interpreted her action as attempted robbery and sank his teeth into her hand, hanging on like a bulldog. A crowd of young boys ganged up on the monkey, who dropped Miss Lally’s hand and attacked a boy named George Meyers, biting his face. The organ grinder pulled the monkey loose and high-tailed it down Sixth Street, with a vengeful crowd in pursuit, throwing sticks and brickbats.

Despite the occupational disdain, an organ grinder named Joe Provedino told the Cincinnati Post in 1905 that he regularly saved up $600 by the end of each summer and feathered that nest egg over the chilly months by taking a job in one of the local factories.

In doing so, Mr. Provedino emulated one of Cincinnati’s first Italian residents, who arrived here along with his barrel organ in 1827. Known as “Monkey John,” he, his barrel organ and his namesake simian were well known in the rapidly growing Queen City. “Monkey John” eventually saved enough to purchase a storefront and, by 1883, was known by his true name of Bartholomew Cavagna, one of Cincinnati’s most successful grocers.

It may have been the war that silenced Cincinnati’s hurdy-gurdy men in 1918, but there was abundant competition from new technologies. Children no longer dropped pennies in a monkey’s cup but purchased tickets to the latest moving picture or the penny arcade. For a brief time, the “Graphophone Man” now strolled the streets feeding cylinders with the latest hit songs into that primitive phonograph at the request of housewives taking a break from their daily drudgery.