Tommy Makem (1932-2007), RIP

Tommy Makem died the other day at age 74. Here's the New York Times obituary (and here's his Wikipedia bio, since I don't know how long the NYT stays online). I'm not sure how many people have heard of him these days, but in the 60s and 70s he and the Clancy Brothers were the best known Irish folk music group in America. They were pioneers arriving at the time of the folk revival generally. I started listening to their albums in college, and whenever you go to an Irish pub these days you'll hear the singers trying to copy the Clancys' and Makem's arrangements. Later the more traditional Irish groups came along with their songs in Irish and their traditional instruments, but to a certain generation of Irish-Americans the "right" way to sing certain songs, especially some of the drinking songs and rebel songs, was the Clancy way. (Makem also wrote a number of ballads and love songs.) Others may see it today as too slick, too packaged, too "Americanized," but that's how we learned it, dammit. Tam loves Irish music but doesn't much like my Tommy Makem's "best of" album, the name of which slips my mind. That's okay, too. Pioneers often lay the ground for better, more traditional folk singers; the Kingston Trio come to mind. (For those of you under 50, look 'em up on Wikipedia.)

I see in the NYT obit that despite Makem's skill at drinking songs and running a pub in New York, he didn't drink alcohol. That may have been true with Makem (he was the Ulsterman in the mix, from Armagh while the others were from Tipperary), but I have a couple of personal memories that suggest it wasn't true of the Clancys. They used to play Washington regularly, usually at one of the universities, and I went to see them in concert a couple of times, I think at Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University. But their fans also learned that after the concert they would generally go to Matt Kane's pub for a few rounds, and once they were suffiicently lubricated would often sing for the house. Now Matt Kane's has been gone for decades, and none of the current generation of pubs comes close: it was upstairs in a walkup on 13th street, much less attractive a part of town then than now. It was for the hard-core Irish pub types. And Marines from Quantico. And at least once that I remember, the Clancys did show up after a concert, and did lead the singing. This might have happened more than once but with the Guinness at the time and the many years since, I'm only certain of being there once when they showed up. That would have been in the late 60s or early 70s at the latest. And Makem might have already left the group by then (the obit says he left in 1969, and I think they may have had somebody else -- Finbar Furey maybe? -- with them at Matt Kane's), but it's the best Clancy story I've got even if Tommy Makem wasn't there, and it's my story and I'm sticking with it.

Several of the Clancys have already passed on, I understand (Makem got back together with Liam Clancy for some duet albums in the 70s and maybe even the 80s), and I just happened to see Makem's obit, but I'll lift a glass to him anyway for the pleasure he gave. I like the final quote in the NYT obit:

When Mr. Makem arrived at Logan International Airport in Boston in 1955, he carried a makeshift suitcase, a pair of bagpipes and an X-ray of his lungs to prove he did not have tuberculosis, he said in an interview with The Associated Press last year. The customs agent told him, “Have a great life.”

More than a half-century later, Mr. Makem declared, “I took him at his word.”

And with that, the only other thing I can think to say is to quote from one of the songs the Clancys and Makem made famous, "The Parting Glass":

Of all the comrades e'er I had, they're sorry for my going away,
And all the sweethearts e'er I had , they wish me one more day to stay,
But since it falls unto my lot that I should go and you should not,
I'll gently rise and softly call, goodnight and joy be with you all.

RIP, Tommy Makem. May you have been an hour in heaven before the devil knew you were gone, as my great grandmother from Athlone used to say. Slan.