The Minstrel Boy

Ladies and gentlemen, the railroad hour. Star started show train. Tonight the Association of American Railroads brings you the delightful musical play, The Minstroll Boy. Starring Gordon MacRae and his charming guest Dorothy Warren Show.

Our choir is out of the direction of Norman Luboff and our music is prepared and conducted by Carmen Dragon. Yes, tonight another memorable musical is brought to you by the American Railroads. The same railroads that bring you the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the fuel you burn, and the multitude of other things you use in your daily life.

And tonight America's railroads take particular pleasure in welcoming to Los Angeles the American Association of Ticket Agents, which is meeting here this week. Many of whose members are with us in the studio audience tonight.

And now here is our star, Gordon MacRae. Thank you, Ma'am Miller, and good evening ladies and gentlemen. Tonight our story is called the minstrel boy. Dorothy Warren should is Bessie. I have the very Irish name of Tom Moore and J.M. Carrigan is our narrator.

So ladies and gentlemen, may we introduce the minstrel boy. Over the evening, Kim, I'm an Irishman, and that shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody. You know, some countries have something fancy called a poet laureate.

Now we never got round to that in Ireland, But we did have a barn, a singer of songs, so familiar to all of us that we never called him Thomas, just simply Tom. Tom Moore, as if we'd known him all the days of our lives, and so we have.

It's like a... Like a...

So that song, and half a hundred dollars that Tom Moore wrote, that sound remarkably like the heart beats of air. Let's look in on his life, like the time he came to London from Dublin, with a sheet of music paper and without.