Legacy Matters

Irish folk singer Clancy dead at 74

Telegraph
Liam Clancy, who died on December 4 aged 74, was the last surviving member of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, the first and arguably the most authentic of the Irish folk groups to make an impact far beyond their homeland over the last half-century; rated by Bob Dylan "the best ballad singer I ever heard in my life", he was also a fine guitarist.

Times Online
Liam Clancy was one of the great ambassadors of Irish music, popularising its rich seam of traditional folk songs around the world. He spent much of his career in America, where he was a strong influence on the folk revival of the early 1960s centred on Greenwich Village, New York, and on the young Bob Dylan in particular.

“Liam was it for me,” Dylan once declared. “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.”
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His early success came singing in the Irish folk group the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, who in their trademark cable-knitted Aran sweaters delivered a slick repertoire of classic Irish ballads and rebel songs to become Ireland’s first pop stars, paving the way for the likes of the Dubliners and the Chieftains. Every inch the lovable Irish rogue with a roving eye, in the 1960s he suffered his fair share of problems with women, alcohol abuse and the American tax authorities, and lost most of his money. He later chronicled these difficulties in an extremely frank autobiography
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A proud and sometimes sentimental patriot, he once claimed that there were only two kinds of singers in the world — the Irish and those who wished they were.
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An appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1961 catapulted them to national fame and a contract with Columbia Records, for which they recorded prolifically throughout the rest of the decade. By 1962 they were selling out the Carnegie Hall and performing for President Kennedy at the White House. On a triumphant visit back home in 1963, they were greeted as conquering heroes who had turned old Irish songs into a new form of polished popular entertainment without compromising their spirit, and in Dublin they sang out of a theatre window for the crowds in the street, who were unable to get a ticket for the sold-out concert.

Here he is telling stories and talking about Greenwich Village and Bob Dylan as a young man