Dan Kelly was an American pioneer recording artist, best known for his 'Pat Brady' series of humorous recitations. Kelly was born in New York City January 22, 1842. Both of his parents were musicians, and he began performing at 13 years old, at Wyatt's Theater in

Hartford, Connecticut Hartford is the capital city of the U.S. state of Connecticut. It was the seat of Hartford County until Connecticut disbanded county government in 1960. It is the core city in the Greater Hartford metropolitan area. Census estimates since the ...

. He continued in minstrel shows such as Bryant's and Christy's, as well as traveling panorama demonstrations, before moving to Cincinnati to record for the Ohio Phonograph Company (a regional subsidiary of the

North American Phonograph Company The North American Phonograph Company was an early attempt to commercialize the maturing technologies of sound recording in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Though the company was largely unsuccessful in its goals due to legal, technical and financ ...

). Kelly recorded also for the

Columbia Phonograph Company Columbia Records is an American record label owned by Sony Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America, the North American division of Japanese conglomerate Sony. It was founded on January 15, 1889, evolving from the Amer ...

and New Jersey Phonograph Company (also subsidiaries of

North American North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Ca ...

at the time). An article in The Phonogram magazine speaks to his popularity in the early 1890s - "Where is there a phonograph in the United States or Canada without a Brady? The answer is, no-where!", and "Kelly ..stands to-day the acknowledged head of all humorous talkers for the phonograph". For all of his fame in the earliest days of the phonograph industry, he doesn't seem to have made any recordings later than 1893 or 1894, and it's unclear what he did later in life. Because he only recorded onto 'brown wax' cylinders, few of his recordings survive today.

References

19th-century American musicians 1842 births Year of death missing Pioneer recording artists People from New York City Place of death missing {{US-musician-stub