Vaudeville Star Jeremiah Cohan, Father of Broadway Legend George M. Cohan, Born in Boston in 1848

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Jeremiah Cohan, circa 1915

Jeremiah Cohan, a traveling minstrel who toured the country with his wife and two children in the late 19th century until they became vaudeville stars on Broadway, was born on Blackstone Street in Boston's North End on January 31, 1848.  

He was one of 10 children born to Michael Keohane and Jane Scott, both emigrants from Bantry Bay, County Cork who had moved to Boston in the 1840s. Michael worked as a tailor and died when Jeremiah was 11.  At the time, the North End was a heavily Irish neighborhood due to the number of immigrants who came here to escape the Irish Famine between 1945-49.

As a boy, Jeremiah worked as a saddle and harness maker and became a Surgeon orderly during the Civl War, before turning to music, dancing and acting.  "From a boy he was an expert dancer," wrote the New Britain Herald.  "It is said that he had inherited some talent for the stage from an Irish minstrel among his forebears." 

He married Nellie Costigan of Rhode Island in 1874, also a talented singer and actress, and they went on the road together, working in minstrel shows, forming a Hibericon, which biographer John McCabe describes as "a form of Irish vaudeville featuring songs, dances and rapid fire sketches."


The Four Cohans, Courtesy of the Harvard Theater Collection

Eventually the couple brought their two children, Josephine "Josie: (1876-1916) and George M. Cohan (1878-1942) into the act, and they became known as the Four Cohans. They were called "one of the greatest headliners Vaudeville," by the Buffalo Express. Their "reputation for clean, wholesome mirth inducing entertainment is known all over the American contentment," according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. 

The Four Cohans, Photo Courtesy of The Billy Rose Theatre Collection, The New York Public Library

Jeremiah was renowned equally as an actor, comedian and sketch writer, but it was his son, George M. Cohan, who became known as the Toast of Broadway and one of the leading entertainers of the early 20th century.  Between 1900 and 1940, George M. Cohan produced 84 Broadway and Off-Broadway productions. Many of them featured the Four Cohans, along with other actors like John Barrymore, Douglas Fairbanks, Chancey Olcott and Spencer Tracey. 




Jeremiah Cohan published a book, called Poems and Sketches, circa 1910, described by the Atlanta Constitution as a "splendid little remembrance he gives to his friends."  He was the first president of the Catholic Actors Guild of America, formed in 1915. He died on August 6, 1917 in New York and is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx along with his wife and two children.





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