Assessment:In his biography of Bob Dylan, Down the Highway, Howard Sounes describes an evening in 1992 when Dylan walked alone into Tommy Makem's Irish Pavilion on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan.
Makem settled Dylan at a quiet table, then got up on the small stage and began to sing - Brennan on the Moor; Will You Go, Lassie, Go - the songs that Dylan had loved 30 years before when he used to watch Makem and the Clancy Brothers play in Greenwich Village.
At the break, Makem asked Dylan, "if you feel like singing a song, let me know", but his guest was happy to sit and listen. Dylan waited until the show was over then sat down with Makem to talk about old times. Like the time, 30 years before, when he had run up to Makem on Sixth Avenue excited about a song he had written himself.
"God it must have been 2.30 or 3 o'clock in the morning," Makem told Sounes of this earlier incident. "Stopping to sing me a long murder ballad that he had written to the tune of some song he had heard Liam [ Clancy] and myself singing . . . I thought, 'God, it's a very interesting thing this young fella's doing'."
A short while later, Makem got a letter from Sony Music asking him to appear at a concert in Madison Square Garden to celebrate Dylan's 30th anniversary as a recording artist. It took Makem quite a while to realise that he and the Clancy Brothers would be appearing not just with Dylan, but with Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Lou Reed, Neil Young, Stevie Wonder and Willie Nelson. Yet he would not have felt entirely out of place in such stellar company. For not alone had Tommy Makem been a star himself, but he was genuinely a part of the very interesting things that the young fella had been doing in the early 1960s.
In the new fusion of European folk song and American commercial music that Dylan did more than anyone to stitch together, there were more than a few threads of Makem's weaving. Dylan once remarked that from listening to Makem, he had come to "think of Brennan on the Moor the same way as I would think of Jesse James". Makem had made Irish songs American.
It is not easy, listening to the stridency of one of Tommy Makem's own songs, like the painfully gauche Four Green Fields that he wrote in 1967, to understand his wider importance. Some of what remains on record is brash and some of it is mawkish. Dylan himself regarded Liam Clancy as a far better singer, preferring his subtler handling of ballads to the more declamatory style that Makem often fell into. But Makem was sometimes a great singer and he always knew the traditions he was using.
If he operated essentially as a blender, fusing the Irish musical past with the American commercial present, he brought something real and potent to the mix. There is a CD issued in 1994 called The Best of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. It is much derided for the poor quality of its sound, but it is worth having for two brief tracks. On them, Makem sings The Cobbler and The Little Beggarman, not with the Clancys, but with his own mother Sarah.
Sarah, who never left her home village of Keady in Co Armagh, was one of the "singing Greenes", a family whose fame as musicians and singers went back generations. And on these recordings, her son Tommy is, for the moment, one of the singing Greenes too. He is not the familiar bold, sometimes florid, showman in the Aran jumper, but a performer of grace and subtlety. With a sparse guitar accompaniment, he sings quietly, elegantly and with a perfectly honed sweetness. Sarah's astonishingly pure, girlish voice follows half a beat behind, twisting a gorgeously supple ornamentation around the lilting rhythms of the songs.
The sound they make is completely captivating, light as air but freighted with a great weight of tradition.
It is tempting, listening to these tracks, to regret much of Tommy Makem's career. The natural ease of these performances, in which you can imagine the two of them singing merely for themselves, contrasts sharply with the commercial product that the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem became. The subtlety of his singing with his mother is quite different from the loud, self-conscious and deliberately flamboyant style of the group. Yet it is also true that without the group, nobody might be much interested in Sarah Makem and the tradition she embodied. And, in a sense, there was nothing very pure about that tradition in the first place.
Keady, where Tommy Makem grew up, was a centre of the linen trade, and therefore open to the cultural variety of Ulster. The traditions he learned from his mother were a mixture of Gaelic, Scots and English songs - a multilingual and multicultural heritage. Sarah sang commercial songs too - her most famous performance was of The Month of January, a traditional ballad that had become a 19th-century parlour song and that she reappropriated for the tradition. Tommy's own superb rendition of the song on Clancy Brothers records released his mother's version back into the new idiom of commercial folk music, where it has become a staple for great singers like June Tabor. Song traditions actually work in this complicated, impure way, and Tommy Makem was in this sense an utterly traditional figure.
It would be a mistake, therefore, to see him simply as a traditional singer who went to America and turned his heritage into a commercial asset. He learned to play the banjo, for example, not at the knee of some gnarled veteran, but from a Pete Seeger tutorial book. He and the Clancys were emigrants before they were performers. Tommy arrived at Logan airport in 1955 with his suitcase and a chest X-ray to prove that he did not have TB - and like generations of gifted Irishmen before them they adapted their talents to the prevailing winds of American commercial culture. Because they happened to fetch up in the new world when the folk revival was getting into full swing, they could trade on the authenticity of their Irish heritage.
What was really authentic, however, was their adaptability. They fused Irish songs with the guitar and banjo-based accompaniments pioneered by Seeger, Cisco Huston and others. They slotted themselves into the promiscuous context of American music in all its variety. Makem and the Clancys played alongside the great jazz musician and composer Thelonious Monk at the Greenwich Village Gate. They appeared alongside Paul Simon at the first Cambridge Folk Festival in 1965 - a seminal event in the English folk revival, though their presence was objected to by folk purists because they were regarded as not being traditional enough. The objections missed the point that what Makem and the Clancys were doing was essentially an act of translation, in which the music of the kitchen and the pub was transmuted into the music of the vinyl record and the concert hall.
Makem's work with the Clancys bridged the gap between his mother's intensely local tradition on the one hand and the emerging urban Ireland on the other. There was a time when theirs were the only Irish records in many Irish households, holding their place with Elvis Presley, Perry Como and Jim Reeves. The noise they made was big and loud and forceful enough to be heard amid the bustle of an awkwardly emerging modernity. If it sometimes sounds too brash and showy now, we have to acknowledge that we had no ears for subtlety. Makem made us listen and re-accustomed us to the true note that was always there in his own voice, even if you had to strain to hear it. In doing so, he helped to create an Ireland that could tune in to those delightful duets between himself and his mother and catch the wonder in their delicate lilt.
