【正文】 as lured away from the British Isles by the seemingly boundless glamour and opportunity to be found across the achieved that rare feat for a British performer of taking American music to the Americans and playing it as convincingly as any homegrown practitioner, or even more several years, his group toured the country, delighting audiences in city after city with their garish suits, funny hair, and contagiously happy , of course, was not Beatle John Lennon but his namesake paternal grandfather, more monly known as Jack, born in is an Irish surname—from O’Leannain or O’Lonain—and Jack habitually gave his birthplace as Dublin, though there is evidence that his family had already crossed the Irish Sea to bee part of Liverpool’s extensive Hibernian munity some time began his working life as a clerk, but in the 1880s followed a mon impulse among his patriots and emigrated to New the city turned other immigrant Irishmen into laborers or police officers, Jack wound up as a member of Andrew Roberton’s Colored Operatic Kentucky brief or casual his involvement, this made him part of the first transatlantic popular music minstrel troupes, in which white men blackened their faces, put on outsize collars and stripey pantaloons, and sang sentimental choruses about the Swanee River, “coons,” and “darkies,” were hugely popular in the late nineteenth century, both as performers and creators of hit Roberton’s Colored Operatic Kentucky Minstrels toured Ireland in 1897, the Limerick Chronicle called them “the world’s acknowledged masters of refined minstrelsy,” while the Dublin Chronicle thought them the best it had ever contemporary handbook records that the troupe was about thirtystrong, that it featured some genuinely black artistes among the cosmetic ones, and that it made a specialty of parading through the streets of every town where it was to this John Lennon, unlike the grandson he would never see, music did not bring worldwide fame but was merely an exotic interlude, most details of which were never known to his the turn of the century, he came off the road for good, returned to Liverpool, and resumed his old life as a clerk, this time with theBooth shipping him came his daughter, Mary, only child of a first marriage that had not survived his temporary immersion in burntcork makeup, banjo music, and Mary left him to work in domestic service, a solitary old age seemed in prospect for remedy was to marry his housekeeper, a young Liverpool Irishwoman with the happily coincidental name of Mary twenty years his junior, and illiterate, Mary—better known as Polly—proved an ideal Victorian wife, practical, hardworking, and home was a tiny terrace house in Copperfield Street, Toxteth, a part of the city nicknamed “Dickens Land,” so numerous were the streets named after Dickens like in David Copperfield, Jack sometimes talked about returning to his former life as a minstrel and earning fortunes enough for his young wife, as he put it, to be “farting against silk.” But from here on