Liam Clancy: Playing to a full house

LIAM CLANCY first decided on Ring, Co Waterford, in 1963. It was over the Comeragh Mountains from Carrick-on-Suir, where he had grown up.

He was smitten with the Gaeltacht region and, after years of trotting the globe with the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, and of living in Canada, he returned there to bring up his four children with his wife, Kim.

Tadhg Ó hUallacháin, a young filmmaker who spent his childhood mucking about in Clancy’s house — his father, Micheál, was a close friend of Clancy’s — has made a documentary about the Ring chapter of Clancy’s life, with contributions from Clancy’s children, Donal and Siobhán, and from old cohorts like Finbar Furey.

Entitled Liam Clancy, Mo Chara, it’s a charming film and a document of one of Ireland’s greatest singers, a man whom Bob Dylan — a friend from their days knocking around New York’s Greenwich Village — said was the best ballad singer he had ever heard.

Micheál Ó hUallacháin says Ring was a haven for Clancy after so many “high speed” years of touring. “It was the serenity of the place, and the fact that he could meet this older generation of traditional singers and musicians — the most important singer here was Nioclás Tóibín — that he fell in love with, because he had known Séamus Ennis and some of those, and he had now found an Irish-speaking area where he could settle down.”

Clancy operated an open-house in Ring. Ennis once visited him at midnight, on the first night of a three-day “midsummer madness party” which Clancy threw on the hill overlooking his house. The piper and folk-song collector stayed for six months. Duncan Stewart designed the spacecraft-shaped house where the family lived on Helvick Head. It had a swimming pool and wood panelling indoors, the grounds of which Clancy surrounded by planting 3,000 trees.

“It was like entering into a castle,” says Tadhg Ó hUallacháin. “There was a spiral staircase going all the way up to the attic. It was like there was a king living there. He was the only man I knew that had a basement. Lifting up that carpet, inside in the sitting room and finding a trapdoor underneath, it was mind-boggling to me.

“He could be having a random conversation with dad in the kitchen and I’d be sitting there. All of a sudden, he would pause and he’d look out the window and he’d go, ‘Did you hear that?’ I’d be there, ‘What?’ ‘I think I heard the white rhinoceros.’ I’d been chasing this white rhinoceros with Liam Clancy out the back of his house for 10 years.

He’d run for the door and he’d catch his big hat and his gun, an air-soft gun, and the two of us would traipse up the fields like two hunters in the middle of the safari. Next thing, he’d start roaring and running back to the house. I’d be wondering where this white rhinoceros was going to come out of, so I’d sprint back to the kitchen, where I felt safest.

“At the start of every year, we used to clean out his swimming pool. We’d drain it. We’d wash it. Scrub it for hours and hours in our wellies, and then we’d fill it up and have the use of it for the summer. We used to have a deal.

Liam would go: ‘Tadhg, I’ll make a deal with you.’ I’d go, ‘OK.’ And then he’d say, ‘If you don’t piddle in my swimming pool, I won’t swim in your toilet’.”

The documentary weaves in elements of Clancy’s career — his metamorphosis from an actor, who appeared in TV shows alongside Dirk Bogarde, Robert Redford and Christopher Plummer, into one of the members of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem.

The band shook the American music scene by the lapels, and had a profound impact in preserving — and making fashionable — a dwindling Irish music tradition.

“The Clancy Brothers broke ground in a big way,” says Pat Sheridan, the Cork sea shanty singer, in the documentary.

“Ballads were things that were all over the countryside, but they were in backrooms in pubs. They seemed to take it by the scruff of the neck, and make these songs their own and do it in a different way.

Taking the songs from oblivion, the way they did, got recognition for those songs, and I think others around the country dragged other songs out of oblivion as a result.”

One of the most captivating passages of the documentary discusses Clancy’s inimitable performance style. He inhabited songs, and could do anything with an audience. Sheridan remembers Clancy performing one night when a young, drunk audience member insisted on singing along, a few words behind, “causing such a racket”.

Clancy sidled over to him, put the guitar to one side, and held his hand, looked at him, and started singing quietly again. The boy quietened down.

If he wasn’t calming them down, Clancy could lift a roof. During some banter with the front row of a crowd at a gig with Tommy Makem, in the 1970s, Clancy ‘hit on’ a pretty girl sitting beside her boyfriend: “I’d swear for her. I’d tear for her. The Lord knows what I’d bear for her. I’d weep for her. I’d leap for her. I’d go without my sleep for her.

I’d fight for her. I’d bite for her. I’d walk the streets all night for her. I’d kneel for her. I’d steal for her, such is the love I feel for her. I’d lie for her. I’d cry for her, but damn me if I’d die for her or any other woman.”

Clancy staged two concerts at Dublin’s National Concert Hall in April, 2009. He would pass away before the year was out. He had stormed the first night, but it left him spent. Around two o’clock the next day, his bodhrán player, Donnchadh Gough of Danú, remembers getting a call to say, “Liam is sick. He can’t play.”

Calls were put out to Finbar Furey, John Sheahan, Gemma Hayes and others to make themselves available. The show went on.

In the second half of the concert, Clancy arrived in a wheelchair. Tom Paxton carried his oxygen, and he walked onstage.

The first thing he did was to recite ‘Death Shall Have No Dominion’, by Dylan Thomas. People were bawling their eyes out.

He closed by singing, ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’: “Oh, the summertime is coming...”

• Liam Clancy, Mo Chara will be screened on TG4 at 10.10pm on Christmas Day.