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Editorial / Periscope - Niall O'Dowd

The Minstrel Boy

August 9, 2007

Periscope By Niall O'Dowd

BACK in the early 1960s, when still not yet in my teens, the world was young and television was a wonder to behold.

I remember vividly my father sitting the family down in front of our newly acquired television and telling us something wonderful was about to happen. It was the era of the Beatles, and he, like every other middle-aged parent, was having difficulty adopting to the sudden revolution that was happening all around.

What he was about to show us was the antidote to all that. Back then there was only one channel, RTE, the Irish television network. It was mostly newsreels and occasional light entertainment.

This, he told us, would be different. It was a strange group called the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem.

They appeared in Aran sweaters, and they sang lustily all the old Irish ballads and some new ones too. My father loved to listen to them.

Makem stood out simply because he wasn’t a Clancy. He was clearly a wonderful balladeer and songwriter, so good that the Clancys wanted him to be part of their family.

I always thought that the old songs were square and the new Beatles much more enticing. Yet there was something about the fist pumping energy from these young lads from Waterford and Armagh that immediately grabbed me.

This was not your father’s RTE. Rather, this was aimed at a young and vibrant generation, one in retrospect that was about to change Ireland forever.

The new Ireland was being born, and Makem and the Clancys were in the first wave.

Song after rollicking song came forth. “I’ll Tell Me Ma” was the instant favorite, and old song Makem had culled from the folklore of his native North, a song that even today rocks and rolls.

My daughter came home recently singing it from her Irish cultural summer camp. It completed a lovely circle for me.

Looking at them on TV long ago, I didn’t fully realize that I was watching our own version of the Beatles. A home-grown version, of course.

But they became a constant in our childhood lives. The Clancys and Tommy Makem had already conquered the world, meaning America, by appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show and creating a sensation.

For backward Ireland at the time, the notion of any Irish performer, especially singing songs that no one except the older generation wanted to hear, becoming world famous was absurd. Except it wasn’t.

A generation later, an American called Michael Flatley, and the Riverdance producers Moya Doherty and John McColgan, would do for Irish dance what the Clancy Brothers and Makem did for Irish song.

Everything that was old was suddenly new again, and a cultural revival unseen since the time of Yeats and the Abbey Theatre is now in full swing.

Years later in America I got to know Tommy Makem reasonably well. It can truly be said that fame hardly impressed him.

He remained at heart a modest Keady, Co. Armagh man in love with his native culture and heath, no matter how famous he became.

It was not always Broadway and bright lights. Tommy was frank that there were problems later with the band, and that investments were made, not by him, that did not go well.

Tommy never cashed in as the multi-millionaire he would no doubt be today in this different era. But he was the last to hold a grudge.

He loved talking about his songs, his creativity and his sense of enrichment from his native county. He was the Bard of Armagh, a title I think that would have given him more pleasure than any other reward or accolade.

He wrote one of the finest Irish songs ever written, “Four Green Fields,” though it has been done to death like “Danny Boy” in many a late night bar sing-song.

It’s actually an incredibly emotional and powerful song that Tommy told me h e wrote after passing along that no man’s land at the border between Northern Ireland and the south, and wondering where exactly the British-claimed territory began, and Ireland ended.

I was delighted to read that at the end of his life, some weeks before he passed, Tommy was able to visit Keady and the hinterland one more time, and drive the leafy lanes, flat planes and high mountains of his youth.

One of the tragedies of the Northern Troubles is that so few knew the sheer beauty and stunning vistas of South Armagh because of the turmoil.

It was here that one of Ireland’s greatest songwriters and balladeers drew his inspiration from. I’m sure the image of his local places stayed with him as he went to his eternal reward last week.

He leaves an extended family that has music and history running through their veins, like generations before. He will truly be missed.

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