Subject: RE: Obit: Tommy Makem has Passed Away- 1 Aug 2007
From:
katlaughing
Date: 03 Aug 07 - 07:58 PM
Keith, thanks for the link. Here's the whole thing:
From The Times
August 3, 2007
Tommy Makem
The godfather of modern Irish music who left a huge mark on the 1960s US folk music scene
Tommy Makem was voted, along with Joan Baez, as one of the two "most promising" acts at the Newport Folk Festival in 1961. Within little more than a year he had been usurped and it was Bob Dylan who was playing king to Baez's queen in the burgeoning Sixties American folk movement. But the assessment of the festival judging panel was perceptive, for Makem was a seminal figure who became known as the godfather of modern Irish music and was still a popular and much loved performer 40 years on.
He was born into a family of singers in Co Armagh, Northern Ireland, and his mother Sarah Makem was reputed to have a repertoire of more than 500 songs. She never performed outside her own rural locality, but her evocative voice and extensive song catalogue attracted the attention of the BBC, which recorded her singing the title song of its influential 1950s folk series, As I Roved Out.
Such a background meant, as Tommy Makem later put it, that he learnt to sing before he could talk. When the American collector Diane Hamilton recorded his mother in the early 1950s, she also recorded his rich baritone and he made his first appearance on disc on the 1955 compilation, The Lark in the Morning. During her visit, Hamilton also introduced Makem to Liam Clancy, a young singer from Co Tipperary. It was the start of a fruitful musical partnership that would endure for another four decades.
Seeing more future for Irish traditional music in America than at home, both Makem and Clancy emigrated in 1956. By this time, Clancy's elder brothers Tom and Paddy were already living in New York, where Paddy was running the Tradition record label. Makem and the three brothers began to perform as a quartet, first at parties and then, as their fame spread by word of mouth, in New York's Irish clubs and bars.
The Rising of the Moon , the first Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem album, was released in 1959. The set comprised mostly Irish rebel songs and was followed swiftly by Come Fill Your Glass With Us — Irish Songs of Drinking and Blackguarding.
Dressed in the trademark Aran sweaters that would become the stereotypical sartorial standard for other Irish performers from Val Doonican to the Dubliners, they had a vigorous and earthy approach that made them favourites on the emerging American folk scene. The centre of musical activity at the time was Greenwich Village, New York, and the quartet sang and hung out regularly in its bars and coffee houses, where they met and befriended young American singers such as Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan.
National prominence followed when they appeared on Ed Sullivan's television show in late 1961 and they graduated from pass-the-hat appearances at folk cellars to the concert stage at Carnegie Hall. In 1963 they performed at the White House for President Kennedy, who was ever eager to cultivate the Irish constituency.
They were also serious musical innovators and without their early influence it is doubtful whether the Celtic cultural tiger would have gone on to roar in the way that it later did. Until the arrival of Makem and the Clancys, Irish traditional song had been sung mostly unaccompanied in a dated style that was dying on its feet. Influenced by such American folk acts as the Weavers and the Kingston Trio, the quartet reinvigorated the tradition by backing their hearty harmonies with guitar, whistle, harmonica, drums and banjo.
Makem was an accomplished whistle player and is also credited as the first to introduce the five-string Appalachian banjo into Irish music when he used the instrument on his 1961 solo debut album, The Songs of Tommy Makem. The set included such, then little-known, traditional songs as The Foggy Dew and The Irish Rover, which would soon become standards and the subject of hundreds of cover versions. It also led to his award-winning performance that year at the Newport Folk Festival.
With America conquered, in 1963 the quartet returned to Ireland for their first concert on home soil. Their international acclaim was crucial in restoring Ireland's pride in its own musical traditions and led the way for the success of such groups as the Dubliners.
But their influence was considerable, not only in reviving and transforming Irish music, but also on American folk performers. Dylan adapted their version of Dominic Behan's The Patriot Game to become With God on Our Side, one of his most potent early protest songs. Decades later, Dylan acknowledged the debt when he invited Makem to appear at his star-studded 30th anniversary gala concert at Madison Square Garden, New York, in 1992.
In 1961 they moved from the tiny specialist Tradition label to Columbia and averaged at least an album a year throughout the rest of the decade. Makem, who had also developed as a songwriter with compositions such as The Winds are Singing Freedom, Gentle Annie and the much covered Four Green Fields, eventually left for a solo career in 1969.
He thrived touring as a solo act and hosted a number of television shows. But in 1975 he found himself sharing a bill with Liam Clancy again at a festival in Cleveland, Ohio. They did a short set together and the euphoric reception persuaded them to resume their partnership. They continued to work as a duo until 1978, making six albums, including Liam Clancy and Tommy Makem in 1976. This included their famous cover version of Eric Bogle's And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda.
After they went their separate ways once more in 1988, Makem continued to perform on the international Irish circuit. He also ran a club, called Tommy Makem's Irish Pavilion, on the corner of 57th Street and Lexington Avenue in New York. The club was used as the venue for the after-show party after Dylan's 30th anniversary concert, and Makem loved to tell the story of how he turned up after the concert and was initially refused entrance to his own pub by Dylan's security as he had mislaid his ticket.
In 1997 he published the book Tommy Makem's Secret Ireland, which indulged his interest in Celtic mythology. Two years later, he began a similarly themed one-man theatrical show, Invasions and Legacies, which explored themes from Irish history and legend. He continued to record, and his 1998 album, The Song Tradition, was regarded as his best work in many years. In 2000 he started the Tommy Makem International Festival of Song in South Armagh. His sons, Shane, Conor and Rory, continue the family tradition and are a popular fixture on the Irish-American folk scene, where they tour as the Makem Brothers.
Dylan acknowledged the influence of Makem and the Clancy Brothers in his 2004 autobiography Chronicles Volume One. Recalling time spent with them in the early 1960s in the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, he described them as "musketeers" and wrote how he had been moved by their "rebellion songs".
Leading the tributes Clancy said that Makem, who had lung cancer, was a fighter until the end, adding: "He just would not give up."
He is survived by his three sons.
Tommy Makem, Irish folk singer, was born on November 4, 1932. He died on August 1, 2007, aged 74
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