As Liam Clancy remembers it, being asked to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show did not seem like a big deal.
“We just did not understand the significance,” he told Irish America in a recent interview, during a publicity tour to promote a brilliant re-release of The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem performing live at New York City’s Carnegie Hall in 1963.
Two years before that historic performance, as Clancy recalls, they were a group of slightly shady characters best known in that bohemian redoubt, Greenwich Village.
“Irish-Americans weren’t really interested in us,” said Liam, the youngest of the Clancy brothers. “Pete Seeger played with us. A lot of people said: ‘They’ve got a Communist up there.’ So most of our audience were folkies and liberal Jews.”
That all changed in March of 1961. The Clancys and Makem had already moved uptown to the Blue Angel on East 55th Street, a more respectable establishment frequented by TV talent scouts.
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