The Clancys

The Clancy family gift is an instinctive sense of theatre.  When the Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem became international stars of the folk music revival in the 60's, it was their innate sense of the theatrical, as well as their musicality, that was the core of their particular magic.

During the 1939-45 war, three of the Clancy brothers enlisted in the Royal Air Force. Paddy was stationed in India, Tom in England, and Bobby in Greece. Paddy and Tom corresponded, sharing their excited discovery of books and plays. They would occasionally cross paths in London and go to the theatre. Later, Tom became a Shakespearean actor, touring with the Anew MacMaster and other groups. Further on, in 1955, the youngest of the family, Liam, would produce and act in a seminal Carrick production of the "The Playboy of the Western World" along with his sister Peg and others who would emerge as movers and shakers of the drama and musical society for which Carrick-on-Suir remains noted. There was a theatre in the town as far back as two hundred years ago.

America became a crucial part of the Clancy destinies. In 1947 Paddy and Tom, along with their lifelong friend Pa Casey of Carraig Beg, first crossed the 'wide and wasteful ocean'. The fare was £21, and the vessel a reconstructed ammunition ship, with rudimentary hammocks instead of cabins.

They went first to Toronto and later moved to Cleveland Ohio where Tom acted with the Cleveland Players. Later, in New York, after a production of Othello, the brothers co-produced "The Plough and the Stars". They had $100 each; Paddy built the sets for a tiny venue and the production then moved to a successful run at the Cherry Lane Theatre.

In 1956 Liam joined his older brothers in New York. They were part of the bohemian life in Greenwich Village, where the seeds of things to come were stirring and they rubbed shoulders in coffee shops and bars with still-unknown icons of the future like Woody Allen and Bob Dylan.

With Tommy Makem of Armagh they sang together for fun, until a television appearance on the Coast-to-Coast Ed Sullivan Show changed everything. Their moment had come and they were suddenly catapulted into a success and stardom that was to be of great significance in opening up Irish folk music to a mass audience. They could command a mass international audience without ever succumbing to shamrockery. Anyone too young to have known the live magic of the Clancys at their peak might get some small grasp of it from their concert recording at Carnegie Hall in 1963.

by kind permission

an extract from Full Tide - a miscellany by Michael Coady