The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem became the world's most famous Irishmen when they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1961.That same year the Newport Folk Festival chose Makem and Joan Baez the two most promising newcomers on the American folk scene. How right they were.
Makem played with the Clancys --Paddy, Tom, and Liam-- until 1969 when he embarked on a solo career. During the 1960s folk renaissance, he shared the stage with Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. He later reunited with Liam Clancy for 13 years. Among Makem's many accolades is a recently issued postage stamp in his honor.
But it all started in his mother's kitchen in Keady, County Armagh, Ulster. Sarah Makem, Tommy's mother, did not travel much beyond her hometown, but she knew more than 500 songs. In 1952, Sarah's songs were collected by Peter Kennedy and Sean O'Boyle and she recorded a signature tune for a popular show on the BBC World Service. Under Sarah's influence, her youngest son learned to play the pipes, the whistle, the banjo, the drums, the piccolo, and the guitar.
Despite a diagnosis of stage four lung cancer, Makem just opened his Eastern Canadian tour in St. John's, Newfoundland. I talked to Tommy Makem in his New Hampshire home via telephone just before he went on tour.
Maura Hanrahan: I'm interested in Sarah, your famous mother. She didn't tour, but she was one of the most influential traditional singers of all time and she was responsible for saving and reviving a number of memorable songs. What motivated Sarah? Did she consciously pass on these songs to you and your siblings?
Tommy Makem: No, she wasn't conscious doing it. She wouldn't know a folksong if she tripped over it. My grandmother and my mother and aunts were weavers and the entire family went to the United States where they were weavers there, too --except my mother, she stayed in Keady, our hometown. It was all weavers here and everyone in the linen mills sang. My mother got a lot of songs from people in the mill. Whenever someone brought a song into the mill, it was a gift. I think they were singing in self-defense because of the noise of the machines. They'd sing back to the noise to keep from going deaf.
My mother had a great facility for songs. If Sarah Makem heard a song once or twice, she would know all the words and the melody. She had a head full of songs. She didn't know how much she knew. They weren't all folksongs; she knew other songs as well.
When she sang for the BBC, people heard it all over the world and it made a difference to them. There was one fellow from around our area who was in hospital in Africa with a broken leg. He turned on the radio and heard Sarah Makem singing "As I Roved Out" and he cried. He came home not long after that.
MH: I've read that Keady, your hometown, was a place where Irish, Scottish, and English songs intermingled, and, indeed, some songs have Irish melodies and English lyrics. What was it about Keady that made it such a place?
Tommy Makem |
TM: Ulster has a very strong song tradition. It's a wonderful mixture of Irish melodies with words in English. The English who invaded in the seventeenth century brought a lot of songs with them, and these were changed and localized. And there was a great Scottish connection; at one point, Ireland and Scotland were joined, according to mythology.
Songs were going back and forth. A lot of people went from Ulster to Scotland to harvest potatoes --they were called "tattie hokers"-- and brought songs from Donegal and Antrim in Ireland to Scotland.
The Irish song tradition is ancient. In the fifth or sixth century, there was a monastery near Bangor in County Down where the monks sang the very songs and chants of John the Baptist. They put in currachs (small leather boats) to points all over Europe. Their boats had no oars or sails so they went wherever the tides took them, bringing their music all over Europe and this is how this old, old music was preserved.
MH: The New York Times once said that your songs and recitations had (American) concertgoers ready to die for Ireland.
TM: (Laughs heartily.) Oh, I don't know about that!
MH: Love of country or maybe it is a commitment to see justice runs through many of your songs, including ones you've composed --I'm thinking of "Four Green Fields" obviously, but there are others. Do you have specific goals when you sing these kinds of songs? What makes you want to sing them?
TM: There's been enough warring and killing and maiming, and it's been going on for more than 800 years and it's still going on. That's the reason I wrote "Four Green Fields." We Irish lived together for hundreds of years and it was all fine, we all lived well together, and we should be left to do it again.
But I've written songs about nearly every subject: love, the sea, even pollution. In the early 1970s, I was home in Ireland for a visit and there was a river that was so polluted the fish were exploding in it. But people wouldn't admit it --it was like people are with global warming today. I wrote a song called "Song for Children," which I may record again because no one knew about it when it came out.
By writing about so many things I wanted to be in the mold of the long history of Irish songs. The melodies had to be Irish-sounding and the words had to suit each other. When you have the grace of an ancient melody with powerful lyrics, you have an unstoppable force. Poetry has great power, even if it's quiet and powerful.
MH: You've spent most of your adult life in another country, away from the homeland you clearly love. In "Carrickfergus," you sing from the perspective of an exile who would swim over the deepest ocean to be in Ballygrand. Tell me about your own experience of being an immigrant or perhaps an exile. Can you relate to the man in the song at all?
TM: I'm lucky because I get to Ireland two, three, or sometimes four times a year. It's mostly to brush up on my accent that I go! (Laughs.) Being in the folk music field has opened up large vistas to me. I got very involved in mythology. When I go to Ireland, I go to the ancient sites, like Newgrange (a megalithic passage tomb, said to be home of Oenghus, the Irish god of love). They don't realize what a phenomenal thing they have there and they don't know how to market it. When I started going, maybe 50 people knew about it. Now, there are swarms of people there.
There is a most magnificent site looking down on Loch Foyle, where the City of Derry sits. The Irish Chieftains left Ireland for Europe from here in 1607. Those are the places I go to. I couldn't be bothered with the City of Dublin.
MH: Two of the most moving ballads you sing, "The Butcher Boy" and "Month of January," tell stories of rejected young women. When you sing these songs you seem to be feeling the trauma these women felt; we can see it in your eyes, you're living the songs. . .
TM: You have to because these songs speak so strongly by themselves. I got both of those from my mother. I found "The Butcher Boy" in a box of tapes at the late Paddy Clancy's Tradition Records in New York in the 1960s. My mother was on that tape, and I got two or three songs from it. I recorded it with the Clancy brothers and it's still quite popular.
They say that "The Month of January" is one of Sarah Makem's big contributions to world music. I think another song, "Little Beggar Man," is a huge contribution. I learned it from her, and it is the first song I ever sang in public. My mother sang incessantly, from the moment she got up in the morning until she went to bed at night.
MH: You've said you're concerned about the loss of culture that has come with modernity in Ireland. What do you think the Irish are losing and how are they losing it?
TM: Through neglect and slight suppression, the Irish have done to themselves what the English government couldn't do in hundreds of years. Elizabeth I sent out a decree that any Irish bard was to be hung on the spot. But they couldn't kill the culture, they couldn't do it.
In modern Ireland, they can't downplay the poets and the playwrights, because other countries will recognize them, but they downplay the music. They deny and neglect it. If you mention Irish music or culture, they say "We're European."
Culture is being forgotten, even pushed down. They'll tell you it's all past and gone --the political songs-- but it's not all past and gone. You can't forget about it. The revisionists would say the Great Hunger was a famine, but it wasn't a famine. Ship after ship left Ireland with food and a person couldn't catch a fish, because he didn't own the lake or river. You can't ignore it. It's very sad that the songs that came from this history and this tradition are being neglected.
Modernity's all right if it's producing anything, but look at television, a good medium that's nothing but a vast wasteland. Everything is being dumbed down.
The Celtic Tiger may be working, but it isn't working for everyone. Moneymaking has become a god in itself. You can make all the money you want, but culture is the essence of your nation and country.
Some years ago I wrote a play called "Invasions and Legacies" about Irish history. Everyone who came to Ireland left their essence in the land. When you walk about, the air pumps it into you. Go with an open mind and an open heart and you'll see it's a phenomenally spiritual country.
MH: Before I take you back to spirituality, I want to know if you think the cultural losses, what's happening to cultural traditions, is unique to Ireland?
TM: No, they suffer from this in Britain as well. And they keep importing what's bad, not what's good. But it's very pronounced in Ireland, because we have such a vast cultural well --an ocean-- and it's noticeable when you don't hear the music. Our very talented young people are not being given a chance or a break in their own country. In Newfoundland they have it right, because they know where their own treasures are.
MH: We value traditional music and all ages love it here in Newfoundland but it gets caricatured, too, especially by actors, even our own.
TM: They do that in Ireland, too. But Irish culture is so powerful and so strong it cannot be destroyed.
MH: Tell me more about the spirituality of Ireland.
TM: Going to these ancient places, certain things happen to me. You have to be open to them, and notice them. When I was a child, I always watched crows and ravens. They're the most intelligent birds and the happiest, always dive-bombing and they are very family-oriented.
At Tara, on the Mound of Hostages, I noticed these two crows and they followed me all day, whichever way I went, whichever way I turned around, 360 degrees around the mound. They even followed me to my car and then flew ahead of me as I drove. When I came to a bend, one went left and the other went right.
I've learned that crows are messengers and tricksters in different cultures all over the world. It's all part of finding, seeing and feeling things that are out there. "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy . . ."
I was going to Ireland last fall and I was in the Aer Lingus lounge at Logan Airport (Boston), looking for a seat. There were so many people there I had trouble finding a seat. I was the solitary person without a cell phone or a laptop or some electronic thing attached to them. I thought, all of us are going to Ireland but, thanks be to God, I'm not going to the same Ireland you are!
[Editor's Note: Despite his illness, Tommy Makem feels well. He has no intention of giving up singing, songwriting, recording or performing. "Ever upwards and onwards," he says, his voice strong and clear.]
Maura Hanrahan's new book is Domino: The Eskimo Coast Disaster. Her web site is www.maurahanrahan.com
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