Liam Clancy was one of the great ambassadors of Irish music, popularising its rich seam of traditional folk songs around the world. He spent much of his career in America, where he was a strong influence on the folk revival of the early 1960s centred on Greenwich Village, New York, and on the young Bob Dylan in particular.
“Liam was it for me,” Dylan once declared. “I never heard a singer as good as Liam, ever. He was just the best ballad singer I’d ever heard in my life. Still is, probably.” Clancy, an engaging character full of old-fashioned, waggish Irish charm, later returned the compliment by reminiscing fondly about Dylan in Martin Scorsese’s 2005 film, No Direction Home.
His early success came singing in the Irish folk group the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, who in their trademark cable-knitted Aran sweaters delivered a slick repertoire of classic Irish ballads and rebel songs to become Ireland’s first pop stars, paving the way for the likes of the Dubliners and the Chieftains. Every inch the lovable Irish rogue with a roving eye, in the 1960s he suffered his fair share of problems with women, alcohol abuse and the American tax authorities, and lost most of his money. He later chronicled these difficulties in an extremely frank autobiography.
In the 1970s he moved to Canada, where he rebuilt his career as a solo artist and as a successful duo with Makem. After several decades in North America, he returned to Ireland, where he built his own studio and continued to perform, both solo and with various family members.
A proud and sometimes sentimental patriot, he once claimed that there were only two kinds of singers in the world — the Irish and those who wished they were.
Advertisement
William Clancy was born in 1935 in Carrick-on-Suir, Co Tipperary. He grew up in an artistic family and was one of 11 children. His elder brothers Pat (or Paddy) and Tom were both aspiring actors and singers who emigrated when Liam was 11, first to Canada and then the United States.
Educated by the Christian Brothers, he moved to Dublin in the early 1950s, where he worked in insurance and took evening classes at the National College of Art and Design. As were his elder brothers, he was drawn to the theatrical world and founded a dramatic society, today known as Brewery Lane Theatre and Arts Centre, where he produced, directed and performed in plays by J. M. Synge, Sean O’Casey and other Irish dramatists.
In 1955 he accompanied the American musicologist Diane Hamilton Guggenheim on a song-collecting trip around Ireland, and it was on this trip that he met Tommy Makem. With Guggenheim’s encouragement, he emigrated to America later that same year, teaming up with his two brothers in New York City, where they were soon joined by Makem.
The two older Clancy brothers were still attempting to make a career in the theatre, staging plays at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village. Money was tight and they helped to pay the rent by staging midnight folk concerts after the theatrical productions.
By the time Liam Clancy and Makem arrived, the folk concerts, at which they performed Irish songs and were supported by American folk singers such as Pete Seeger, were proving more popular than the plays and the four formed the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. Pat Clancy also set up Tradition Records to release their recordings alongside American stars of the folk and rural blues revival such as Josh White, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Odetta. The quartet’s first full album, The Rising of the Moon, a collection of Irish rebel songs, appeared in 1959. It was followed that same year by Come Fill Your Glass with Us — Irish Songs of Drinking and Blackguarding, which introduced songs such as The Croppy Boy and The Foggy Dew to an American audience for the first time. The group’s strength was that all four were fine singers and a third self-titled album in 1961 marked them out as assured and consummate performers, with Liam’s dramatic style making his the strongest voice of all.
Advertisement
An appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1961 catapulted them to national fame and a contract with Columbia Records, for which they recorded prolifically throughout the rest of the decade. By 1962 they were selling out the Carnegie Hall and performing for President Kennedy at the White House. On a triumphant visit back home in 1963, they were greeted as conquering heroes who had turned old Irish songs into a new form of polished popular entertainment without compromising their spirit, and in Dublin they sang out of a theatre window for the crowds in the street, who were unable to get a ticket for the sold-out concert.
By then they had befriended the young Bob Dylan, who hung out in the back room at their favourite Irish bar, the White Horse on Hudson Street, once Dylan Thomas’s favoured New York haunt. Dylan became particularly close to Liam and the two remained friends, while the Clancys’ influence on him can be heard in songs such as Restless Farewell, which he based on their rendition of the traditional The Parting Glass, and With God on our Side, for which he borrowed the tune from The Patriot Game, written by Dominic Behan but which Dylan heard performed by Liam and his brothers. The group continued to record prolifically as the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem until 1969, when Makem left for a solo career. Clancy released his first self- titled solo album in 1965 but continued to sing with his brothers until the early 1970s, by when the folk boom had run out of steam.
He also had a troubled time personally, admitting in his 2002 memoir The Mountain of Women that he drank heavily to mask his problems and that he had fathered a number of children that he had never known.
After leaving the Clancys in 1973, he relocated to Canada, where he launched his solo career with The Dutchman in 1974, a melancholic but acclaimed collection that mixed traditional songs with more contemporary fare from the pens of such singer-songwriters as Dylan and Ralph McTell.
In 1975 he was reunited with Makem at a folk festival and it led to a 13-year partnership as a duet, during which time they released half a dozen albums.
Advertisement
After the death of Tom Clancy in 1990, Liam joined family members on a new version of the Clancy Brothers, who then reunited with Makem for a stirring performance at Dylan’s 30th Anniversary Celebration Concert at Madison Square Garden. This version of the Clancy Brothers also recorded the 1995 album Older But No Wiser, before he formed a new group with his son D?nal and Robbie O’Connell, who recorded two albums as Clancy, O’Connell & Clancy.
He returned to Ireland and settled in Co Waterford and released his final album, The Wheels of Life, in 2009. Seriously ill with lung disease, he gave his final performance in May 2009 in Dublin, during which he recited Dylan Thomas’s poem And death shall have no dominion.
Shortly before his death the director Alan Gilsenan released the full-length film The Yellow Bittern: The Life and Times of Liam Clancy.
He is survived by his wife Kim and four children.
Advertisement
Liam Clancy, folk singer, was born on September 2, 1935. He died on December 4, 2009, aged 74