Liam Clancy Looks Back

With St. Patrick's two days away, two of Ireland's most recognizable musical collectives -- the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem and the Chieftans -- have been pulled back into the spotlight with a pair of best-of collections that capture two decidedly different approaches to traditional Irish songcraft. As for the former, Clancy ringleader Liam Clancy has gone a step further than allowing his musical legacy to speak for him. The sixty-six year old singer and actor has penned his first book, The Mountain of the Women, a rich collection of anecdotes, tales and capers from his life.

Like Clancy's stage work (he was an actor as well as a singer), his memoir snakes its way from setting to setting -- Ireland to Appalachia to New York City -- and the supporting cast is vast: Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Robert Redford, Lenny Bruce and numerous others. And while the characters provide an interesting backdrop, it's Clancy's way with a word expanded over a full narrative that is most notable. For The Mountain of the Women does have its confessional moments of rock & roll-ish excess, but unlike the tell-alls by the leather-and-Aquanet set, Clancy's memoir is written in rich, engaging prose cut from a timeless Irish tradition.

So having read the book, it sounds like it might not have ever been written without an ill-fated swim . . .

Yes, it started on my sixtieth birthday. I had a big party, about 150 people, and somewhere along in the middle of the night, I stripped off to the buff and bared my birthday suit, appropriately enough. And I plunged into the swimming pool and got pneumonia and ended up in the hospital. I had just bought a laptop. And there was nothing to do in the hospital except wait. I bought a type program and started learning to type. And I remembered a line from an old Bob Dylan song [sings in Dylan voice] he not busy being born is busy dying. So I thought, 'Fuck this, I'm not gonna die. So I'm gonna to start living. When I got out of the hospital, I took my kids out for a day's jaunt; we were photographing old castles and whatnot near my home. And we visited this old churchyard . . .

I take it you mean your old, not our old.

Right. [Laughs]. It was the remnants of a churchyard from the Seventeenth century, so yes, our old. And there was a tombstone with my name on it. William Clancy. Liam is the Irish for William. And he was buried there in 1735; I was born in 1935 two centuries later. And try as I may I could find nothing about him. Not his life not his times and it came back to me the words of the Greek poet Nikos Kazantzakis: "When a man dies, that particular vision of life that was his and his alone dies with him. It therefore behooves every man to tell his story." And I thought, "I don't want to be in a grave like this when I'm dead and someone come along 200 years later and try to figure it out." So I decided to write down all my experiences and they turned out to be extraordinary in that, I've come across some very strange crossroads. I was born in a little town with one foot in medieval times, our playground was the old Norman walls and castles. My brothers were out fighting in World War II, which was really the beginning of the Twentieth Century, because of the speed of communication. So I was caught in that crossroads, then going through school, coming out of school. And a woman from America came to Ireland collecting folk music. I traveled with her to lug the heavy equipment. It turned out she was one of the Guggenheim heirs. To make a long story short, she took a shine to me and I didn't quite know what was happening. She was an older woman from New York, twice divorced and I was a twenty-year-old kid from this medieval town. And she took me to America. She asked me what I wanted to do and I said, "I want to be an actor. I want to be a writer. I wanted to make films and see the world." We ended up making a record company called Tradition Records.

Singing and running a record label seems to be a roundabout way of becoming an actor.

Yes, I went down to New York and my brothers set up a tab for me at the White Horse Tavern. And I lived for a couple of years on fifteen-cent beers and twenty-five-cent hamburgers. And I still couldn't pay the tab. So we used to sing folk songs in the back room, big ballsy sea shanties, and recite Dylan Thomas, he had just taken his last drink there in 1953.

Or his last thirty-six drinks.

Yes, [laughs], thirty-six; that was no small amount. But, as it turns out I was coming up on another crossroads. The coming explosion of folk music and the whole civil rights movement, the Vietnam thing. It was a time when America was full of a Crucible-like white heat, ferment and conflict. And of course in that kind of cauldron is where you get real creativity. And I didn't realize until later how exciting that whole thing was. That forms the basis of the book. I ended up going on to be an actor, working on Broadway with Robert Redford and Julie Harris. And we had some wonderful times.

And New York City seemed to provide a comfy musical community, despite the disparate types of "folk" music, blues, bluegrass, and such.

We had a wonderful group of musicians who were all like-minded; Pete Seeger, who played banjo on the first Clancy Brothers record, Bruce Langhorn on guitar and Eric Weisberg on banjo. Even without thinking about money, they were willing to just play for the sake of doing it. I remember Don McLean, when he was riding the crest with "American Pie" and "Vincent." We were short a guitar player during a recording session, and he came down and he spent two days with us recording and insisted on not having his name any bigger than any of the other musicians. He got paid the princely sum of $80, which was the union scale. I thought that was a wonderful gesture and that was the mood at the time.

So, with the forty years of performing is there a single favorite professional thrill?

There was one night that I particularly loved; the thing that appalled me when I first came to America was on St. Patrick's Day. Green beer, green potatoes, plastic hats and plastic shamrocks and it just, I don't see anything wrong with it now, but at the time I was just so idealistic and it rubbed me the wrong way. At the time I got together with the writer Frank O'Connor, a man whose work I loved. He was the master of the short story and the director of the Abby Theater under Yeats, he and I got together and on St. Patrick's night in 1961, and we put together a production of the Cuchulain cycle of Yeats plays. He was the hero of Irish myth. And everybody who was in that audience could not think of Ireland again in terms of green beer and shamrocks. We had created something which was truly Irish and great. That night stands out in my memory as a highlight.

Did you worry that writing about your life was sort of like jumping back into that pool?

[Laughs]. You know that's a very close analogy. I hadn't thought about that one. Because if it's going to be authentic you have to expose yourself. You have to tell the truth. Your sisters who never left home, they're gonna be upset or embarrassed about how honestly you talked about your mother's religious breakdown or the wild things you did yourself, trying to find release in drunken nights at the White Horse. But it all came to a head at the end of this first book and culminated in The Ed Sullivan Show. We did about four or five Ed Sullivan Shows, sold millions of records and went on to travel the world. It's so common now with the big bands, the U2's, but at that time, that kind of massive thing couldn't be done, because the sound systems didn't exist. The biggest concert you could play was Carnegie Hall. But everybody could hear. We played an outdoor concert at the park in Boston, there was 45,000 people there -- nobody had done this before. It took over two hours to get to the stage. And of course, we couldn't be heard on the outer perimeter, but we still tried to belt it out. It was quite an adventure, but I thought, there's some wonderful anecdotes along the way and I wanted to write as many of them as I could remember.

Did you have any troubles finding a publisher for the book?

The thing that amazed me, was that I actually finished the book. I thought, "By god I'm gonna get this published, but I didn't know how to go about getting that done." I did know that most writers could paper their walls with the rejection slips. But a New York friend of mine, she used to vet programs for CBS, she saw one of my one-hour tapes of song and poetry and said, "I have an agent friend that you've got to meet." She went to him and said, "I've got a writer for you." And he said, "Great, who is it?"

"Liam Clancy of the famous Clancy Brothers."
"I've never heard of 'em, how old is this guy?"
"He's in his sixties."
"What's he got published."
"He's never published anything. I've never read a word he's written."

He said, "Wait a minute, you want me to talk to a guy in his sixties who you've never read from a band who are mostly dead that I don't know of, who's never written anything?" She said, "Yes." Anyway, I met him for fifteen minutes. He looked across the desk at me and said, "What's your book about?" Two-and-a-half hours later we were still talking. Cancelled all these appointments. He said, "By God if you can write like you can talk, I think we've got something going." I guess I've always been lucky.

ANDREW DANSBY
(March 15, 2002)