Born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, on January 1, 1857, Margaret Cline, daughter of Irish immigrant parents, went to work at twelve in a local shoe factory. At seventeen she decided to seek a career on the stage. Over the next several years she performed with vaudeville companies around the country. The golden era of vaudeville, roughly the 1890s and a few years on either side, was also the period of Irish songs, and Maggie Cline was the great female exponent of both. Tall, muscular, red-haired, ╥the daughter of Hercules and descendant of Stentor,╙ she put over such songs as ╥How McNulty Carved the Duck,╙ ╥Nothing╒s Too Good for the Irish,╙ and ╥Slide, Kelly, Slide,╙ as no one else could. Her rendition of Joseph Flynn╒s ╥Down Went McGinty to the Bottom of the Sea,╙ a comic production enlisting the collaboration of stagehands, musicians, and audience alike, was a great hit from 1889. Her greatest success was with ╥Throw Him Down, McCloskey,╙ written for her by John W. Kelly in 1890. It was the story of a pugilistic encounter, and Maggie Cline╒s performance╤perhaps rather enactment╤of it regularly aroused the audience at Tony Pastor╒s or any other vaudeville house to rapture. She sang it, she once estimated, 75,000 times, earning the nickname ╥Brunnhilde of the Bowery.╙ After her retirement in 1917 she lived quietly in Red Bank, New Jersey. She died in Fair Haven, New Jersey, on June 11, 1934.
