#5 - Frosty weather, snowy weather, when the wind blows, we all go together
The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, In Person at Carnegie Hall, 1963
Well happy St. Patrick’s Day to you all. We all got our sweaters cleaned in celebration. Once a year, whether they need it or not.
The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem released In Person at Carnegie Hall in November 1963, a live recording from March of that year. The record was a selective edit of one of their annual St. Patrick’s Day gigs, with a few stray tracks from a previous concert at the same venue. In the original release, it is just under thirty seven minutes long. And it is perfect.
The Clancys and Makem were half-accidental, half-manufactured. The album features the family trio of Paddy, Tom and Liam Clancy, with Tommy Makem the vital uniting element. The Clancys were migrants from Tipperary to New York City, and began life there as fairly successful off-Broadway actors. Diane Hamilton, heiress to the Guggenheim fortune, played a major role in introducing the brothers to Makem, and moving Liam Clancy and Makem from Ireland to New York.1
The album opens with Johnson’s Motor Car, a 1921 tune by Willie Gillespie commemorating an IRA escapade of the same year in which a group in Donegal hijacked the car of a unionist doctor to transport arms during the War of Independence. A version of the song had been recorded a few years earlier by a Scottish group called The Emmettones, but it was the Clancys and Makem who popularized the song again. In 1969, the band’s money and contacts helped to found the National Association for Irish Justice (NAIJ), a left-wing Irish Republican support group in New York headed by Brian Heron, the grandson of James Connolly. One of their first actions was to brand a bus as “Johnston’s Motor Car”, and use it to follow around and picket a British train called the “Flying Scotsman”, which was transporting British goods across the United States on an odd PR exercise.
Irish Republican politics hover in the background of much of the group’s music. There are the classic rebel ballads, The Rising of the Moon, Brennan on the Moor or Roddy McCorley, but there are also many stray stage comments, mainly from Makem, half-joking grumblings about England or cryptic asides about the realities of life in Armagh in the middle of the century. And there are songs like Johnson’s Motor Car, creations of the War of Independence, Civil War and after.
One of the most militant, I think, of the Irish rebel songs, was a song called the Soldiers of the Legion of the Rearguard. Y'know this song was actually banned by the Irish government. Maybe they didn’t like it as a song, I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t like the music. But the theme of the song was very much to the point. You see, the vanguard was Pádraig Pearse and the sixteen men who fought in Dublin in 1916. The men who came after them in the troubled times - they called them the civil war - were a militant crowd, and their determination actually did get us our freedom or partial freedom. The soldiers of the legion of the rearguard.
- Paddy Clancy, Live at Carnegie Hall 1962
Legion of the Rearguard, the song in question, is most definitely an anti-treaty anthem. It was written, funnily enough, by a guy called Jack O’Sheehan (no relation, as far as I know) who was once imprisoned by the British government for “seditious singing”, which I think we can all agree is a great charge on which to be brought before the court. The song is still popular at Fianna Fáil Ard Fheiseanna today.
The major artistic achievement of the Clancy Brothers and was to take existing folk music material, from memory, songbook or elsewhere, and reforge it into something new again: a faster, heavier, livelier sound. Makem had probably the deepest roots in the old stuff, his mother Sarah was a legendary ballad singer and the family practically musical royalty. It’s no coincidence that the Clancys started out on stage, as their stage presence is what transforms the material into something that could achieve worldwide fame. The Clancys and Makem didn’t invent pub music as we know it, but they helped to develop the vernacular by which the most popular version of it is performed today. Out were the solemn, slow studio versions and in were raucous semi-live recordings. They did it, crucially, outside the country, subject to the influences and commercial pressures of the United States. They were successful first abroad, but the cachet of American cool meant that their re-entry to Ireland was explosive. The year after this LP was released, nearly one third of all records sold in Ireland were Tommy Makem and the Clancys.
Part of the joy of In Person at Carnegie Hall is how distinct all the personalities are. The tough patriarch Paddy, the genial Tom, the spiky, funny Tommy Makem and Liam, the youngest and cleverest of the brothers. The watcher, the observer, the man with perfect timing. According to Bob Dylan, the greatest ballad singer he ever heard. In immodest moments I feel very close to Liam, the youngest of nine, struggling from under the shadows of his older siblings. It is a great regret that I never saw him, or any of them, perform. Doing research on this period feels at times like stepping into an empty room that was just now full of people. The smells, the traces, the feelings are still there. But the people needed to make sense of them are gone.
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- Liam Clancy
The discography of the group became increasingly confusing after the mid-sixties, partially because the group split and reunited so many times, but also because their music was lucrative enough to be constantly re-released in dubious box sets and collections with titles like Ireland’s Favourite Drinking Songs! As a result there are dozens of versions of each song out there. In Person at Carnegie Hall contains the definitive version of many. Liam Clancy delivers probably the most well-known version of The Patriot Game of any artist, though as previously noted, the song’s author Dominic Behan hated it for removing the verse critical of De Valera.
In Person at Carnegie Hall is a distilled spirit, less than 40 minutes long. A full version of the concert exists, and was released on an anniversary reissue a few years back. It has its own charms, and is worth a listen, but it loses something too. The record as first sold has the tightness of careful editing that allows for endless listens. It becomes the sort of album that you can listen to twice in a row without wearing out its welcome. It was produced by recording legend Harold Leventhal, a leftist who was blacklisted and denied a passport during the McCarthy years. In his time he worked with everyone from the Weavers and Odetta to Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez and Alan Arkin. Leventhal is one of those figures who my own research is built on, someone whose career stretched on through the twentieth century and whose vision united so many disparate artists and ideologies. It was he who organised tribute concerts for down on their luck (and short on funds) legends like Phil Ochs and Woodie Guthrie.
- Leventhal and Bob Dylan, (Woodie Guthrie Centre)
The centrepiece of the album is the second to last song, called on the original pressing simply Children’s Medley. This is not one song, but fifteen, some only a few seconds long, punctuated by little vignettes, memories, jokes and laughter. If you’ve never encountered it, I would seriously recommend taking a few minutes to listen before you go on.
Last summer, when we went home to Ireland, we threw a party for our little nieces and nephews – the children of the family. And they sang their children’s songs and played their children’s games, and we fell in love with our own childhood songs all over again. We’re going to sing some of them for you now.
The children’s rhymes and songs have an uncanny feeling of recognition to them. Even if you have never heard one before, you suspect they live somewhere in your memory, as if someone sang them to you in the cradle or you heard a snatch of one in a dream. they range from the comic to the melancholy. A friend my age from Drumcondra remembered the one about the Illy-Alley-Oh, another from Clare has told many times of the Wren Boys doing the rounds on St. Stephen’s Day. The fragments travel back in time and around the island. Ask your parents or grandparents and they might remember one or two, or all of them. But are they remembering hearing them as children, or are they remembering this record?
Of course there is artifice here, inevitably, but there is alchemy too. All acts of remembering have some artifice in them. We do not really recall the past, we recreate it again, imperfectly, incompletely. We copy a copy, and the edges smudge, the words warp and change. In rendering real children’s songs on one of the most successful albums of the day they were taking something and freezing it, fixing it in amber, for good and bad. It was a recreation of the past that lives now in their future. The Clancys and Makem all died youngish. Not as young men, but younger than they should have. 74, 74, 76, 66, 75.2 Not so old. The kind of age when you’ve lived hard, and had both great fortune and misfortune. There are many other recordings of their songs, and even many versions of the Children’s Medley. On a 1962 recording they sound slightly hesitant, as if they were just learning their lines. On later versions there is a weariness underneath the showmanship, the memories worn thin and fine from overuse. Here every cue is perfectly hit, every laugh feels genuine and the boys egg each other on with whistles and shouts and kind exclamations. There was a moment between the naive and the jaded, between rehearsal and exhaustion. There were splits ahead, bitter feuds and bad blood too. There was sickness, and sadness, and late reconciliation. But there was one night on St. Patrick’s Day 1963 where they were perfect, and it lives on, under needle and vinyl, frozen and flawless.
Extras/Would Recommend
Reading: “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” - Shirley Jackson, 1962
Listening: “I’m On My Way” - Barbara Dane, 1962
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Liam Clancy’s 2002 memoir, The Mountain of the Women, is well worth a read, though a little tricky to get your hands on.
This includes the often forgotten Bobby Clancy, God rest his soul.