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The Mountain of the Women: Memoirs of an Irish Troubadour

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Anyone who has ever heard the recording of "Peter Kagen and The Wind" which Mr. Clancy recorded with Tommy Makem, or heard Mr. Clancy present the poem "Pegasus" knows his unusual ability to involve the listener in the story of a song, or in poetry written by others. For many performers that would be enough. With this book Mr. Clancy proves his abilities extend beyond that. His special way of presenting the series of stories incorporated in this book makes reading a different experience - one has only to open one's thinking, and allow the gentle energy of the unfolding stories to keep the course as he leads the reader through Ireland of the 30's, 40's and 50's. The style makes for easy reading - almost as though someone were there reading it to you. He incorporates much Irish history in some of these stories, yet there is nothing dry about history with this style of presentation. A story from his childhood or youth is being told, then, to establish for the reader a larger grasp of understanding, he slightly opens for the reader a door to a more distant past - perhaps a few hundred years. Stories of experiences. Stories of family. Stories of friends.
Then come the adventures in the United States.
At rare times exposed to wealth extreme. At other times exposure to the other extreme of the financial spectrum.
There are stories of the 60's Greenwich Village. The characters who became friends. Friends, many of whom later came to be regarded as icons of the time. We are led through striving of work to provide sustenance; the fun of the singing get-togethers; the evolving of what would become, with his brothers Paddy and Tom, and Tommy Makem, a group well known in many parts of the world.
This is a book written in a style simple enough to include the depth presented. It is the autobiography of the early years of a man. It is the work of a poet.
It is the first book in a long time I have felt I wanted to buy as gifts for friends to assure they have the opportunity to experience what it offers.
It is a book for those curious about the 60's Greenwich Village scene. It is a book for those interested in Irish history. It is a book for those interested in music. It is a book for "Folkies." It is a book for those interested in human nature and interaction. It is a book about a boy developing, finding out who he is on his way to becoming a man. It is a wonderful trip Mr. Clancy has allowed us to share.

Life experience, not so much reconstructed as double-distilled, is recaptured in the telling of Liam Clancy's thrilling and insightful memoir. Here's his hometown, Carrick-on-Suir, an almost mythically Irish hometown in the backwaters of the Emerald Isle. Where careeneth a procession of townsfolk both dotty and dour: Here's the town publican. There goes a creepy-looking cluster of nuns. Hark the churchbell, tolling out the Angelus, and oh, have a heartbreaking serving of tragedy along with your tea. Most important of all, observe the morally upright Mammy Clancy in action, pinning her hopes on her eleventh child: surely this shy impressionable son is a priest in the making. The author's eye fondly revisits family life in loving but not uncritical retrospect, the idealized Irish family, thrown headlong into life's tough struggles.

An idyllic setting, interrupted one day by the arrival of one world-weary American heiress with a hidden agenda. She's determined to travel the world collecting folk music with the young Liam as her assistant. But can it be, she wants to snag him and possess him as her own--much as Dido, the evil queen of Homeric legend, attempted to do to Ulysses? And if so, could you blame her? This kid's a natural: a real Irish choirboy with an old-world brogue and a penchant for reciting poetry. He obviously needs seducing.

Ah, Liam, me boy, you're in for a bumpy ride... or rather, a picaresque romp from the footlights of backstage Dublin to the hollers of Appalachia, on to Cambridge, Mass., and New York's zany, East Village arts "scene," where you'll meet everybody who's anybody. And, every once in a while, right back home to Carrick again, trailing clouds of cultural alienation. And great green gobs of maternal disapprobation.

There are enough imbedded elements of Tom Jones that one could easily conclude this has just got to be fiction. So it's well the author pinches us awake, as social injustice, poverty, narrow-mind religious judgementalism, moral hypocrisy and intellectual vapidity present themselves. Not that any of that stops our hero.

As he describes becoming a force to be reckoned with-first on the stage, and then in popular music-Liam Clancy is forthright about a few gaffs and stumbles. The hardest to swallow-given the idealization of family that serves as oxygen during his early life-is brief, bitter mention of a daughter, the product of an early relationship, whom he largely declined to be a father to. An included photograph of the author, posed beside this beautiful child, is simply disturbing.

As the memoir ends, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem are just about to reach the inexplicable pinnacle of fame as accidental musicians. A bit unsettled by the nutty East Village scene, our boys momentarily return to the village of their roots-where the local townfolk haven't changed a bit-they are, as ever, totally insane. Back they go to New York.

The reader senses the chronicle ahead. . . Fame is fleeting, the singing group will eventually tire of life on the road, and, after all, to many amps can you crank a pennywhistle before someone's sinus linings hit a harmonic? One prays for Volume Two, wherein Liam, classical hero that we know him to be, crowns life's journey with maturity and self-knowledge, and expiates a life of fond transgressions by founding his own rollicking, loving Celtic dynasty. Of course, Volume 2 will need to be as thoughtful, resonant, funny and well-crafted as the present work, so that the reading of Liam's life remains in keeping with the living of it.

Liam Clancy still has legions of fans around the world, and his fans have been waiting anxiously for this book. It is, in a word, delightful. He takes us through the landscape of his birthplace of Carrick-on-Suir in County Tipperary to the early days of the sixties in Greenwich Village. Along the way we watch a metamorphosis occur: from the shy baby of a large, loving and musical family, to an experienced stage actor who revels in all the temptations of the body and soul. What struck me about his story is that he does not pull punches nor does he excuse or whitewash his experiences and antics. You are there as he drinks too much, picks up women, and goes from one adventure to another. The story is plainly told, yet Clancy's ear for poetry comes shining through his prose in a most heart-warming and deightful way.

The only complaint I have about the book is that is seems to stop rather abruptly. It almost seemed at the end of the book that Clancy was busily trying to cram in as many names as he could (managers, restaurant owners, fellow entertainers etc.) and neglected to actually wind up the narrative. I'm hoping this is Volume One in a series; we at least would like to know what happened to him from the middle sixties to the present.

If you are a Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem fan, I heartily recommend this book.

I just finished listening to the audio version of "The Mountain of the Women". It is beautifully written and the music of Liam's voice and the feeling that he brings to recounting his memories of personal, cultural and professional devlopment provides a spell-binding experience. I have been a devotee of Liam's music for many years. I was often at The White Horse back in the 60's when Liam, his brothers and Tommy Maken would hold forth with song and story. This work opens up an entirely new understanding of his background, his upbringing and the forces that shaped his life and career. It is a treat to experience an Irishman's moving memoir that depicts a life that was not founded on drink and poverty, but on culture, beauty and a passion for his profession.

I never heard Liam Clancy sing until a couple of months ago, when I found a copy of an album called "The Lark in the Morning" that looked interesting, given its cover and its date of the mid-50s. Growing up, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem were heard of but not heard by me--I associated them with Aran knit sweaters, hearty shour-an'-begorra singalongs,novelty tunes, and the kind of kitsch that the previous generation had listened to complacently before the revival in the 70s of a tougher trad scene out of Ireland shook it all up again.

Well, I heard the tracks on "Lark" in the car without knowing who was who since I could not see the CD case listings. But when I finished it, I noticed that the songs that had stood out from the rest were all by Liam C. Impressed, I read the liner notes about one Diane Hamilton, who I had never heard of, and Tradition Records, the label for which "Lark" was the debut issue. But the whole story was not clear, given the brief notes, until I read "Women of the Mountain."

From the title, I expected a tale of lusty drunken couplings and riotuous escapades from the "Folksmen"/"Kingston Trio" era. Instead, an evocative tale of growing up eating mortar and chalk for nutrition during WWII, poverty, clerical abuse, and hardscrabble small-town life in Waterford's Carrick-on-Suir unfolded smoothly and eloquently. Sure, the blarney sometimes is laid on a bit too thick for less glib me, but the stage Irishman tendencies are kept mercifully in check by realism: the death of a sibling, the estrangement from mother and Church, the entanglement with Diane H. (who turns out to be a Guggenheim nearly as neurotic as her relative Peggy G. did for Beckett!), and the adventures on the road, in theatre, and on stage.

One surprise and a reason for four stars is the lopsided nature of the book: the singing takes decididly second fiddle to the stage in the dramatic sense. This was fascinating for me, but it misleads the reader perhaps who by the back photo of the group harmonizing might expect far more about Clancy's musical experience. He mentions, for example, as if offhandedly that he learned the tin whistle. Yes, but how? As a musician, did he find it easy after the guitar? How did it help his reportoire? Did he learn it so the group could expand its range? How does it sound to him? How does he play it? Here, music as enacted comes rather late in the book, in not a lot of detail, and seems rather superficially treated as opposed to other incidents and events.

I do commend Clancy on his delicacy with relating his own romantic and emotional engagements with women and men--he reminds us of the fragility we all possess and the need to recognize humanity in each other. And he makes his point after having earned the right to say so after his own checkered past. He comes off wise without sounding pious, intelligent without acting snobbish, and flawed without playing it up as maudlin. He handles people and places with stamina and wit, and his own coming-of-age here, while cut off while he's not even thirty yet, needs however fuller exposition than is given here. The New York Greenwich Village years deserve more depth than they're given here; the book's unbalanced in favoring much more from his pre-NYC years (nothing wrong with that) and again this may mislead misinformed readers as to its actual coverage of many more early situations predating the group's rise to fame. I also got little sense of how he got along with his fellow group members--granted that two are his brothers--but how the three Clancys got along with Makem who was from Keady in the north and from a different region, musical tradition, and political regime seemed like the sort of detail that could have enriched the book.

I guess a sequel is in the works. Like recent Irish memoirs by Frank McCourt and Hugo Hamilton, the autobiographical account stops suddently, at the height of a self-realization by the author in his formative years. I do not know if this book would have been published if McCourt had not led the way, but resilient Clancy's tale too deserves a wide readership for dispelling (as do McC and HH in their accounts--also see John McGahern's memoir) the myths of recent Irish life, while advocating a return to the more durable and more feminine myths that inspired Yeats, Behan, Synge, Joyce, and the Slieve-na-mBan/Sleivenamon that gives its rounded breasted mountain shape to the landscape that rose above Clancy's hometown.

First of all,there are 17 other reviews;most of them excellent and all deserve to be read.I read a fair bit of modern Irish Writing.The McCourts,Roddy Doyle,Brendan Behan,Morgan Llywelyn,Brendan O'Carroll,just to name a few.What I really like about these writers is their magical use of language.Although I have been a fan of Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers for at least 30 years,I have never read anything about them.I had no idea of how much they were involved in acting;let alone that any of them had such gifted writing skills.What a surprise;Liam's skills are as good as his musical talents.
Though not a Clancy,I heard Tommy Makem perform here in Toronto at an intimate club a few months ago.He did "Oh, me name is Dick Darby,I'm a cobbler.";mentioned on page 102.That had to be the best recitation I ever witnessed.
I would like to quote something Liam wrote about his experience in North Carolina in 1956 and he was writing about it nearly 50 years after the fact.
From page 170....
"South Carolina in the spring was seductive with scents of growing things,of magnolias and hibiscus,the air heavy with noontime heat and the swampy buzz of katydids and flying critters.The nights there belonged to the frogs and bats and flying beetles and the countless mingled smells of a land at rest after a burgeoning day's work fermenting life." Imagine the thoughts of a 21 year old,written 50 years later.
I also had no idea of Clancy's involvment with the people like Oscar Brand,Bob Dylan,Woody Guthrie,Pete Seeger,Odetta,Barbara Streisand,Lenny Bruce,Jean Ritchie,Ramblin' Jack Elliot,Brendan Behan,Diane (Guggenheim),Josh White,Alan Lomax,Mary O'Hara and on and on.
Liam gives a great insight into the world of acting and folk music of the 50's and the 60's. Now that I have read the book,I am looking forward to listening to the tape.
I also have no idea if Liam has a second book planned to cover the last 40 years.I am sure it would be a great follow up.How about it Liam,you're only 70 ,and you must still have lots to tell us.
Thanks.

Devotees of the Clancy Brothers music may be in for a bit of a disappointment if they are expecting a neat and tidy, A to Z chronology of Liam's life. For this account is not a "poor Irish kid rises to the top" story, but rather an amazingly descriptive
account of Liam's nervous childhood, his less than devoted parenting and the countless faces who influenced him as he struggled in a foreign land.

As one breezes through the easy to follow passages, it becomes clear the author has set out not to impress the reader, although that wouldn't be hard for Clancy to do, but rather to give and gain perspective about life, love and the music which we all love.

I highly recommend this book to anyone......

The most enjoyable Book on CD'S I have ever read.Liam makes it come alive to the extent that you would think he was at the fireside reading it to you. His descriptions of events are full of colour and shadings that make it really interesting.I can unreservedly recommend this CD collection to anyone. I'm just on the last of the five cd's now and I'm sorry in many ways that I'm almost finished it - I just wish there was more. Still I'll read the whole book next although I doubt if it will be as good as listening to the author reading it.

This book is the perfect example of True Celtic spirit; laugh at yourself, and never let anyone or anything keep you down. I would recommend this book to anyone. It's warm, insightful, humorous, and thought-provoking. Liam Clancy takes his readers gently by the hand and leads them through the highs and lows of his life. He shares everything from his early childhood memories to the beginning of his incredible musical career. Taking the advice of Shakespeare, he is indeed to his own self true. He's not afraid to face the good times or the bad. Like the man, his music, and his singing, this book is truly a treasure.

Liam Clancy portrays a poignant, honest, and sometimes irreverent portrait of the life of a young man growing up in the Ireland of the 40s and 50s. His prose is as lyrical as his music, sprinkled with laughter and pathos.

I read, and understood his struggle living in a country of which he said had one foot in the twentieth century and the other in the Middle Ages. From provincial Ireland to the fast pace of New York's Greenwich Village in an era of coffee houses, folk singers, booze and (Playboy) bunnies, the multi-talented Liam Clancy comes out a survivor, unapologetic and charming.

My only problem with this book is that it ended too soon.

Will we be treated to a sequel, Mr. Clancy?