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Sleeve Notes
Tommy Makem grew up in the mill town of Keady, County Armagh. He was the youngest of five children. His father Peter worked as a scutcher and was a fiddler, his mother Sarah worked in the mills and was always singing. Sarah's knack for remembering songs brought her renown. She didn't differentiate between folk songs and popular numbers. she just sang. Song collectors began travelling to Keady, eager to help preserve as many lesser known folk songs as they could gather from Sarah. An American named Diane Hamilton walked into the Makem household in Keady. County Armagh in the early 1950s. She was collecting songs and was told that she needed to visit Sarah. Hamilton brought along a young man named Liam Clancy from Carrick-on-Suir. Tipperary to run the recording machine. And during the recording, he and Sarah's son Tommy hit it off. A few days later. Tommy and Liam attended a dance in Newry, County Down and Tommy was asked to sing a song. Clancy recalled that the raucous crowd was far too loud to pay attention to one young man and prepared to see his new friend fall flat on his face. But Tommy took a seat on stage, pulled up one leg over another and began the movements as if he were fixing his shoe. Then he sang the Cobbler. The crowd fell silent as Tommy ran through the piece apparently unaware of the crowds' presence. At the end. the crowd erupted into applause. Liam knew there was something special about this skinny Keady boy.
Both agreed that when they arrived in America, which they both had plans on doing, they would meet up. Tommy Makem arrived in Boston in December 1955 at a time when emigration was the norm. His aunts and an uncle had made the trek years earlier and Tommy planned on staying with one of his aunts while he got his feet on the ground. He was invited to join the Old Vic in London, but instead decided to head to America. His plan was to become a stage actor. When he arrived at Logan Airport in Boston, he carried with him a suitcase, a set of bagpipes and an x-ray of his lungs as proof that he didn't have tuberculosis. His only dealing with authority until that point was with the R.U.C., so when he reached the US immigration officer at Reykjavik airport. he was guarded. The officer asked if he was carrying any poteen and when a nervous Tommy Makem replied, 'no sir. I have nothing,' the man joked, 'well what good are you then?' The officer handed Tommy his papers and told him to have a good life. Decades later Tommy recalled in a newspaper interview that he took the man at his word.
After arriving in America, Tommy stayed with his Aunt Annie in Dover. New Hampshire and worked at a factory named Kidder Press. In what could have been a tragedy. Tommy got his left hand caught in a press and his hand was crushed. The doctors were going to amputate his fingers, but a young surgeon was experimenting with new procedures and after five operations Tommy's hand was saved.
He travelled down to New York City to meet up with Liam Clancy so they could get to work on finding acting jobs and they both began acting on stage. Liam's two brothers Paddy and Tom were also in New York with the acting bug and one evening the four men got up on stage to sing a few songs together. They quickly realized that a night of singing was paying more than acting, so they decided they should knuckle down and learn a few songs together.
The burgeoning folk scene in America was ripe for something new and the Clancys and Tommy were unlike anything the area had seen. They hadn't studied folk. They had lived it. They sang energetic songs with gusto. No pretention. Their natural talent for entertaining won over crowds whenever they performed. They recorded an album in a friend's kitchen, the first of which would turn out to be their livelihood. One night in Greenwich Village, the focal point for the American folk boom, a scout from the country's most popular television programme, the Ed Sullivan Show was in the crowd. The four men were booked to play the show. As fate would have it, one of the other acts couldn't perform, so the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. as they were now called, sang for 15 minutes, the longest slot ever on the programme.
Those 15 minutes cemented their hold on the American public. Irish Americans, who had always shied away from their heritage, began to embrace it. That pride crossed the ocean and those living in Ireland began to listen to the old songs all over again. At one point, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem represented a third of all albums sold in Ireland. After a performance in Chicago, Illinois, in the early 1960s, Tommy met a beautiful woman who had been dragged to the show by friends, Mary Shanahan. Mary's parents had left County Kerry decades before and both had died when she was a young girl. She had grown up with a friend's family. Tommy and Mary married in 1963 and a year later, while living in New York City, had their first child Katie. The family moved back to Ireland and lived in the village of Dromiskin in County Louth for years where they had three sons, Shane, Conor and Rory.
In 1969, Tommy left the Clancy Brothers and pursued a solo career. Three years later with more work in America the family returned to Dover, New Hampshire.
Tommy stayed busy for years until he met up again with Liam Clancy at a festival in Grand River. Ohio. The pair reunited for a few songs and the crowd loved it. So, Tommy and Liam began singing as Makem and Clancy. They worked on new material and performed with brilliant musicians, selling out concert halls throughout the world again. The pair garnered an Emmy nomination for a television programme made in New Hampshire and recorded gold and platinum albums.
But after more than a decade Tommy was ready to move on again. He started a restaurant in New York City. Tommy Makem's Irish Pavilion. It was his plan to have a showplace for travelling musicians and singers. A few years later Tommy's three sons began performing as the Makem Brothers. They spent dozens of nights playing at the Pavilion, cutting their teeth on the New York scene. And, of course, Tommy performed there as well. The Pavilion gained notoriety as a place where song lovers could catch some of folk music's best performers. Tommy's repertoire continued to grow and his interest in ancient Irish heritage and history blossomed. What had always been important to him became a necessity in his life. Every trip he made home to Ireland brought him to Newgrange. the Neolithic tomb in County Louth. His nephew was able to get Tommy into Newgrange during the Winter Solstice, an experience he considered one of the highlights of his life. He visited every ancient site he could find and began studying Ireland's myths in depth. In 1997, St. Martin's Press released 'Tommy Makem's Secret Ireland.' a book compiling Tommy's favourite spots in Ireland. Tommy also wrote and performed the one-man play 'Invasions and Legacies.' which sold out its three week run at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York City. Throughout the 1990s Tommy began receiving prestigious accolades for his contributions to Irish culture. The World Folk Music Association awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999. After being named to several of Irish America Magazine's Top 100 lists, he was elected to their permanent Hall of Fame and received Aer Lingus/Irish America Lifetime Achievement Award. In December 1999. Tommy, along with his old partners Liam, Tom and Paddy Clancy were named in the Top 100 Irish Americans of the 20th Century by Irish America Magazine.
The University of New Hampshire honoured Tommy with a Doctor of Humane Letters in 1998. Also, that year, he was placed in the Congressional Record.
In 2001. the University of Limerick bestowed on Tommy his second doctorate. In 2006. Ireland placed the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem on a stamp. And in July 2007, weeks before his death. Tommy received a doctorate from the University of Ulster.
Tommy passed away on 1 August 2007. His funeral mass spilled into an overflow room with a video link set up for those unable to fit into the church. The fire department carried Tommy's casket on a fire truck to the funeral mass and then to the graveside, the police department all but shutting down the former mill town for the funeral procession.
