RETRO: The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, ‘A Spontaneous Performance Recording’
Happy St. Patrick’s Day, REBEATers! If my name and the red hair/freckles combo haven’t already given it away, I grew up in a fiercely proud Irish-American family, and St. Patrick’s Day in the Farrell household was probably second only to Christmas in terms of big family holidays. The celebration would start at breakfast, with my mom’s homemade Irish soda bread, and would end with a dinner of my dad’s corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes, served on the fancy family china. My dad decorated the house with Irish flags and shamrocks, my brothers and I were obligated to wear green, and our school lunch bags usually included some shamrock-shaped sugar cookies my mom had baked the night before.
Probably the most important part of our family’s St. Patrick’s Day was the music: the Irish ballads, rebel songs, and drinking songs that played all day long on the living room turntable. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem made up a large share of my parents’ Irish music collection, and their Spontaneous Performance Recording has been a long-time favorite of my family’s.
Recorded in 1961, at the height of the “great folk scare,” A Spontaneous Performance Recording was the Columbia Records debut for the Clancys and Makem. As “the young fella” Liam Clancy reveals in the album’s liner notes, he got to know his much older brothers, Tom and Paddy, through the process of recording their first album. Tom and Paddy had left Ireland as young men to fight in World War II, and had been pursuing acting careers in the United States for some time before Liam joined them. Before Liam left Ireland, he had spent time traveling the country collecting folk songs with musicologists, and he brought these songs with him to the United States. The brothers formed a record label, Tradition Records, to release an album by their friend Tommy Makem, and singing and recording together led to a musical career that quickly eclipsed their acting ambitions.
A Spontaneous Performance Recording clocks in at a speedy half hour, but it’s full of the energetically performed traditional songs that became Clancy and Makem trademarks. The rousing singalongs like “My Johnny Lad” and “Reilly’s Daughter” are balanced by the tender treatments of ballads like “The Whistling Gypsy.” Liam’s light tenor sets off the rougher, deeper voices of his brothers and Makem, shining on “The Work of the Weavers” and the Irish language song “Port Lairge.” As they transition from a stirring sea shanty to a ballad, they quote the writer Richard Sheridan, who called Ireland “the land of happy wars and sad love songs”; the group touches on the more tragic side of Ireland’s history with rebel songs like “Young Roddy McCorley,” and the story of the religious and cultural divides that led to songs like “The Old Orange Flute.” Makem provides nimble tin whistle accompaniment, Liam plays guitar, and the group is joined by two other, well known American musicians: Bruce Langhorne on guitar, and Pete Seeger on banjo.
The recording isn’t exactly as spontaneous as the title suggests–the brothers and Makem were performing in a Columbia Records studio for an invited crowd of of 200, including enough fellow musicians to make the audience singalongs sound as professional as the singing onstage — but there are still plenty of fun unplanned moments throughout the album. The audience applauds enthusiastically when Seeger and Langhorne are introduced, but Liam cautions, “Forget about ’em, forget about ’em! Wait’ll they do something before you clap!” When Tommy Makem botches “Shave and a haircut, two bits!” at the end of “Port Lairge,” Liam groans audibly at the last sour note. The introduction to “Roddy McCorley” is interrupted twice: once by a crying baby (“Out!” Tom orders) and then by a loud crash, which is laughed off by the band as the beginning of one of Sheridan’s “happy wars.”
The Clancys and Makem were always at their best live–compare the fun of this record to the almost sedate performances of many of the same songs on 1959’s Come Fill Your Glass With Us–and A Spontaneous Performance Recording captures the spirit of their live performances, and the spirit that makes Irish traditional music so enduring and endearing. I can’t imagine celebrating St. Patrick’s Day without it.
