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Those We Lost: recent Irish-American passings

By
Kara Rota,
Assistant Editor, Irish America Magazine

Published Thursday, January 21, 2010, 4:43 PM
Updated Thursday, January 21, 2010, 4:45 PM

 

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The late Liam Clancy.

Liam Clancy
1935-2009

Liam Clancy, the last surviving member of the Clancy Brothers, died December 4 in Cork, Ireland, at age 74. He had been treated for the lung disease pulmonary fibrosis.

Born the youngest of 11 children in Co. Tipperary, Clancy immigrated to America in 1956 with plans for a career on the stage. He joined his older brothers Tom and Paddy in New York, and they began performing Irish folk songs along with friend and fellow immigrant Tommy Makem at local clubs. In the early 1960’s, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, as they were billed, starred on The Ed Sullivan Show, and their career took off in the folk music center of Greenwich Village, where Clancy became friends with fellow musician Bob Dylan. In 1984, Dylan said, “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.”

In 1973, Clancy began a solo career and starred in his own television show in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. In the 1980s, he again teamed up with Tommy Makem and the pair recorded such classics as “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda” and “The Dutchman.” Clancy published his memoir, The Mountain of the Women, in 2002, and a documentary about his life, The Yellow Bittern, came out in 2009. 

Tom Deignan’s poignant last interview with Liam Clancy in the April/May 2009 issue of Irish America covered the quartet’s historic rise to fame. “With their Aran sweaters, tin whistles and banjos, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem might seem to be the quintessential Irish trad artists. But they were, in many ways, a radical departure who then went on to change Irish-American culture,” wrote Deignan. Liam Clancy told Irish America: “Irish people in Ireland were surprised. They’d never heard these songs this way.” Recalling the popularity that ensued after their breakthrough performance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1961, Clancy recalled, “We just did not understand the significance…It was like getting a blessing from the Pope!”

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