The stark message title on Cyberpluckers, "Rest in peace, liam clancy" was the first I learned of the death of one of my favorite performers, someone for whom you could be forgiven for trotting out the cliche, "It's the end of an era."

In the early Sixties, while a college student, I was also stage managing the Living Theatre's off-Broadway production, "The Connection". We'd close the theater around eleven or eleven thirty each evening. That was too early to go to go home so I'd often head for the White Horse Tavern. I'd started going there because it was a kind of literary hangout. Brendan Behan (who I nearly had to physically eject from a Living Theater audience one night because he'd insisted on bringing his cigar in with him) was a regular there. Another writer, Dylan Thomas had also been an habitue. Thomas, a heavy drinker, actually had his last whiskey there. At a tavern table, he'd fallen into a coma from which he'd never recovered and had died not long after.

I always looked forward to the singing at the White Horse bar, people just breaking into song. The best was when a quartet whom I soon gathered were professionals and actually had made paid appearances around town, were there. I really enjoyed them. Even so, there was a woman upstairs who used to complain about the noise late in the evening when these guys were hitting their stride with vigorous renditions of Belle of Belfast City, Brennan on the Moor and the like. We all got to join in the choruses so it could get pretty boisterous. Of course, the quartet was the three Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem.

I was lucky enough to be at a number of these informal performances. I remember vividly sitting just a few feet from Tommy Makem when he pulled out a bar stool, sat down, and sang "The Cobbler". He was so intense. His miming of the cobbler at work at his bench seemed perfect. It was more than a song, it was a moving theatrical experience.

Standing so close, I could hear the banter between the four of them. It was witty, really funny. I think it was out of these sessions that many bits that started extemporaneously later were honed and became a part of their act.

My favorite episode though had nothing to do with their music, at least not directly. The woman upstairs who had called repeatedly over the past months again called one evening when the Clancys were singing. Instead of complaining, though, she had a question. "Are they the men who were on the Ed Sullivan Show last Sunday?" The bartender told her that they were. That was the last time she called!

Over the past four decades since that time, I have been an unabashed Clancy fan. I've bought their records, then their CDs, I've leaped at the chance to go to any of their performances and I've learned many of their songs. I've been nurtured by the vitality of their music. I feel a deep disappointment that now I can never hear any of them again.

This afternoon when I was leaving to play at a river festival here in Petaluma, I decided to wear my Aran sweater and with feelings of Gaelic gaiety mixed with the sadness of the finality signified by Liam Clancy's death, I sang two of my favorite Clancy songs, Belle of Belfast City and William Bloat.