Legendary singer Count John McCormack was born in Athlone in 1884. The mill worker's son, fourth of eleven kids, joined the choir in St. Mary's church choir. Nobody in his congregation couldve guessed they were listening to the future best-paid concert singer in the world. McCormack won gold at the Feis Ceoil in 1903, aged nineteen. A friend at that same festival, a bronze medallist and unknown writer named James Joyce, would go on to remember him fondly enough to write him into literary legend. He moved to Milan and studied under Vincenzo Sabatini, father of the novelist Rafael Sabatini, and by 1906 was making his operatic debut in Savona. Covent Garden followed in 1907. By the age of twenty-three he was already a global star. America is where McCormack stopped being merely famous and became something closer to a cultural event. He debuted at the Manhattan Opera House in 1909, then walked away from opera almost entirely to chase the concert stage instead. It was a strange decision for a man with that voice but he performed 95 concerts in a single season. Sold-out houses coast to coast and earned record royalties that outpaced Enrico Caruso's, a fact that reportedly earned McCormack a nervous warning from his own Neapolitan friends not to let it happen again. He became one of radio's first true superstars, when the medium itself was barely out of its infancy. He took American citizenship in 1917 but returned to Ireland in triumph for the Catholic Emancipation centenary, where Pope Pius XI made him a Papal Count, a title he wore with more pride than any opera role. By the late 1930s the touring had worn him down. He gave his last major performance not for a paying crowd but for his own son's wedding in 1941. He died in 1945 near Dublin, in Booterstown.