Salut! Live

I probably took my folk music a bit too earnestly in those days, which made it easier for me to push their work into an easy-listening category. Musical pub grub.

In their heyday, they were called the four most famous Irishmen in the world. For a while in Ireland, their albums outsold Elvis Presley’s.

I wasn’t so much saying they’d sold out as that I wasn’t sold on what they were doing. Without ever properly listening to them, I tuned them out.

Unjustly so.

I’ve been reading A Freewheelin’ Time, Suze Rotolo’s terrific 2009 memoir of Greenwich Village in the 1960s and the folk music revival.

Rotolo recalled hanging out at the White Horse Tavern, a literary and music pub that over the years attracted everyone from both Dylans (Thomas and Bob) to Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer and Jim Morrison.

Paddy, Tom and Liam Clancy, she wrote, “occupied a table in the back room most nights. Already very well known, they sang and told stories and had a good time along with everyone else.

“Tom Clancy chased my sister home one night all the way down Perry Street declaring his undying love.

“Most of the women at the White Horse knew that was the risk of staying too long at the bar when Tom Clancy was nearby and drinking heavily. He was the wildest of the brothers, and they were a wild bunch.”

Liam, she said, “had the gift of a fine tenor voice and he truly knew how to use it. He could make you weep when he sang a ballad.”

Here he takes lead vocal on The Parting Glass, a song that Bob Dylan remade into Restless Farewell (which Liam also went on to record):

“Tom and Paddy were dramatic and forceful singers,” Rotolo continued. “Tommy Makem’s liquid baritone had a tremulous vibrato, and he carried the same kind of magic as Liam when he sang. One of the songs in his repertoire that could hypnotise an audience was The Cobbler.”

Makem would put his foot up on a stool “and rhythmically mime sewing a sole onto his shoe as he sang the song acapella. It was mesmerising.”

“These guys made singing a theatrical event,” said Rotolo. “Above all, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem were actors who sang.”

Okay, so clearly not so mainstream. Time to put aside my prejudices and start digging.

Down to the bedrock, which these guys absolutely were. Not only of the folk revival in New York but also for their role in putting Irish folk music into the ears of the world.

“They were the first,” Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angela’s Ashes, wrote in 1999. “Before them there were dance bands and show bands and cèilidh bands. They opened the gates.”

It’s no exaggeration to say that without the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, there might have been no Dubliners. Ronnie Drew said simply, “They did open it up.”

Paul Brady, Christy Moore and even U2’s Bono have acknowledged the group’s impact on their musical development. As has Dylan, who told Bono in an interview in 1984, “They influenced me tremendously.”

Not bad for three brothers who set out to have an acting career, both on stage and screen. Tom, in particular, continued with that even after their success as musicians.

In the ’70s, he played a CIA agent in the movie The Killer Elite, which starred James Caan and Robert Duvall; and a pirate in Swashbuckler, alongside Robert Shaw, James Earl Jones, Geneviève Bujold, Angelica Huston and Beau Bridges. On TV, Tom had roles in shows such as Charlie’s Angels, Starsky & Hutch, Little House on the Prairie and The Incredible Hulk.

Tom and his older brother Paddy emigrated to Canada in 1947 and spent a couple of years in my adopted hometown, Toronto, before moving to New York to seek work as actors. To raise money, they organized weekly folk concerts.

Liam and Tommy Makem, who had met in Ireland, came separately to New York in late 1955 and early ’56. Makem had already made a record. He suggested to the brothers that they should record together, and the result was The Rising of the Moon, an album of Irish rebel songs with a simple harmonica accompaniment by Paddy. This is O’Donnell Abu:

The album, on their own small Tradition Records label, was successful enough to lead to a second one, Come Fill Your Glass With Us, in 1959.

They were now better known and more successful as folk musicians than actors and were playing regular gigs in New York, Boston and Chicago. Legend has it that one club owner asked what the group called themselves. They couldn’t think of a name – apparently they briefly considered The Chieftains – so he put them on the billboard as the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem.

When he first moved to the U.S.,  Makem badly injured his left hand in an industrial accident. All the same, he was a pretty fair banjo player, as evidenced on Rothsea-O (that’s how they spell it; I’d have said Rothesay) from The Boys Won’t Leave the Girls Alone, the group’s third album, out in 1962:

The group played at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959. In 1961, they landed a spot on The Ed Sullivan Show – a massively popular weekly TV variety show with a viewing audience of about 40 million people – and this led to a recording contract with Columbia.

But their influence was already being felt.

Odetta’s first solo album, Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues, was recorded on the Tradition label. Dylan has said that was the album that inspired him to become a folk singer.

The brothers and Makem became friends with Dylan in Greenwich Village and he was a huge admirer of their music.

In his interview with Bono, Dylan said, “There is no question but that they were great. Liam Clancy was always my favourite singer. As a ballad singer, I just never heard anyone as good.”

Dylan invited Liam, Tom and Paddy to play at his 30^th anniversary concert at Madison Square Gardens in 1992. Makem had long since left the group to pursue a solo career, but Dylan insisted the post-show party be held at Tommy Makem’s Irish Pavilion pub.

It was there that Liam diffidently asked if he and his brothers might record an album of Dylan’s songs.

According to Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, Howard Sounes’s acclaimed 2001 biography, Dylan responded, “Man, would you do that? Would you?”

And then he added, “Liam, you don’t realize, do you, man? You’re my f***ing hero.”

The project never came to fruition but the Clancy Brothers’ final album, Older but No Wiser, recorded with their nephew Robbie O’Connell in 1995, had two Dylan songs, When the Ship Comes In, and Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie.

If the latter sounds like a Clancy classic, that’s because Dylan based it on the brothers’ and Makem’s version of Brennan on the Moor:

As for those sweaters, The Clancys’ mother, worried about New York’s ferocious winters, sent four from Ireland for her sons and Makem. They wore them, simply because it was cold, to a club gig. Their manager, Marty Erlichman, seized on this and decided it should be their special look.

The group wore their “uniform” on The Ed Sullivan Show:

Sales of Aran jumpers reportedly rose by at least 700 per cent. That would include the one my mother bought me. Of course, being in England, she’d never even heard of Ed Sullivan. And I don’t think I ever wore it. My dad wore his.

• Tommy Makem died in 2007 aged 74, Tom Clancy in 1990 (66), Paddy Clancy in 1998 (76) and Liam Clancy in 2009 (74).