The Economist has the best of all the obituaries I've read for Tommy Makem.
Many years ago, when my mother was pregnant with me, she inexplicably went on an Irish folk-music kick. For years, I thought her brief affair with that music explained my own love for it. More recently, I wonder if perhaps it was the other way around: the developing baby was influencing
her. Whatever the cause, the songs of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem resonated in my heart all during childhood. I learned to operate a record player so I cold play their LPs; I memorized all the albums; and on nights when living seemed like too much, I would lie on my back in our darkened livingroom with my head near the speaker.
At the time, I did not know that Irish vocal music is a solitary tradition. The old men in the pub in Kingscourt would shush each other with great seriousness, so that one of their number could compose himself and warble one of the old rebel songs, or courting songs, or praise-of-place songs. The Clancys and Tommy Makem were less refined: they stood around a microphone and whaled away, and it sounded alright, or at least enthusiastic. Makem was the best singer of them all, it was clear, and no surprise that he had a healthy solo career afterward, when it was just his baritone filling the air.
I had wanted to go on one of the musical pub tours he lead of South Armagh, or the folk festival he organized there. To have such musical talent come from a region that sank into such darkness and brutality, and to have music play a part in the revival of hope in that area--it's something you'd want to be part of.
As it is, I'm sad today. I'll leave with two quotes from Tommy Makem, and an excerpt from the piece in the
The Economist.
On Ireland today:
We're so obsessed with modernity we don't know what we're losing. They're making gazillions of dollars in Ireland but they're losing their culture.
When asked if he planned to retire soon:
Yes, of course, I retire every night and in the morning when I awake I realise just how lucky and privileged I am to be able to continue doing the things I love to do.
He had performances booked through this fall.
IT ALL began in the kitchen of a house in Keady, County Armagh, in Northern Ireland, where Tommy Makem's mother Sarah, as she stirred a pan on the hob or filled the kettle, would sing of morning dew and magpies' nests, Barney Mavourneen and Mary of Kilmore, ships and red roses:Red is the rose that in yonder garden grows
Fair is the lily of the valley Clear is the water that flows from the Boyne
But my love is fairer than any.
Tommy said he could sing before he could speak; and not long after he could play piccolo, fiddle, tin whistle and the five-string banjo. He would stand up in the church hall, no taller than a chair, and sing “The Little Beggarman”:
I am a little beggarman, a begging I have been
For three score years in this little isle of green.
Music and tales filled not only his home but the rolling fields and hills of South Armagh itself. The heart of Ireland seemed to beat there beneath Slieve Gullion, the mystical mountain where the hero Cuchullain had learned his warrior skills and where the hunter Finn MacCumhail, bewitched and curious, had tracked a white doe to the summit. Tommy Makem picked up those legends too and, in 1955, took them to America, together with his bagpipes and a suitcase patched up with tape.
He meant to work in a cotton mill and do a bit of acting, but one St Patrick's night he was paid $30 for singing two songs in a club: “and I thought, by God, this is the land all right. Gold growing in the streets.” By 1958 he had teamed up with his friend Liam Clancy and Liam's brothers Paddy and Tom, who had come from Tipperary to America before him, and the gold continued to accrue. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, all kitted out in Aran sweaters knitted by Mrs Clancy, triumphantly rode the wave of a folk revival that was turning Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie into stars. Adapting to the new world, they added tin whistle and banjo to the old songs and quickened the pace, because, as Tommy said, “The heartbeat of America is so much faster than the old country.” They did “The Morning Show” and “The Tonight Show”, Ed Sullivan and Carnegie Hall, landed a $100,000 contract with Columbia and ended up singing “We Want no Irish Here” in front of Jack Kennedy at the White House, while Kennedy flashed his white teeth and rocked with laughter.
Tommy Makem was always the key man, with a baritone sweet as buttermilk or sharp as salt, nipping effortlessly over his “hi the dithery idle lum, dithery oodle idle loos” and his “roo run rye, fa the diddle dye, hey the O the diddle derry Os”. And for a lifelong teetotaller no man had more feeling when he sang of hoppy beer or dark-frothing porter or devilish golden whiskey, or almost anything at all served up in a jug in a bar:
When I am in my grave and dead
And all my sorrows are past and fled
Transport me then into a fish
And let me swim in a jug of this.
The songs he wrote himself he dismissed as “garbage altogether”, never to be compared to the old words and melodies he wanted to preserve in live performance. But a few he was proud of, and none more so than “Four Green Fields”, in which “a fine old woman”—Ireland—sang of her fourth field, Ulster, that was still “in bondage/ In strangers' hands, that tried to take it from me”. In America his audiences, largely third-generation Irish of the diaspora, would weep and sing along until, according to the New York Times man, they were “ready to go out and die for Ireland”.
All told, Tommy Makem's choice of songs was fervently nationalistic: children's rhymes about “King Billy”, or rebel songs such as “The Wind that Shakes the Barley”, in which the hero's sweetheart is killed, as they caress in a glen, by a British bullet. And most stirring of all, in a voice with an edge like a knife, he would sing “The Patriot Game”:
Come all you young rebels, and list while I sing,
For the love of one's country is a terrible thing.
It banishes fear with the speed of a flame,
And it makes us all part of the patriot game.
Bob Dylan adapted this for his great anti-war song “With God on Our Side”. But Tommy Makem tried always to separate his love of country from the horrors of sectarianism. As Northern Ireland slid into the Troubles after 1969, he kept away from politics—a task made somewhat easier by staying in America, where he went on singing to the end of his days. In the dark low-ceilinged bar he bought in New York in the early 1980s, the rule of the house was tolerance and good fellowship. And the slow dawning of peace in Northern Ireland was celebrated by the founding in 2000 in South Armagh of his International Festival of Song, a deliberate declaration that singing could lead men out of darkness, just as Finn MacCumhail at the top of Slieve Gullion found the doe he was following transformed into a beautiful young woman, who smiled at him.
