It’s the night before I’m heading off to meet Liam Clancy and I’m obsessing on the word ‘troubadour’. Nothing wrong with that: it’s a fantastic coinage, one that is most relevant to Mr. Clancy who did, after all, call his 2002 autobiography, The Mountain Of The Women: Memoirs Of An Irish Troubadour. An odd, mongrel word, it first popped up in the 11th century to describe the wandering minstrels of southern France, eastern Spain and northern Italy and most likely hails from a fantastic conflation of ‘taraba’ (“to sing”), an Arabic word, and from “turbare”, the Latin for “turning up unannounced.”

“Unannounced! Ha!” exclaims Liam Clancy. “I like that a lot. A travelling musician who crashes your party.”
Sitting in Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel, the singer is in good form despite his need for an oxygen mask and an array of medical supplies. The man once described by Bob Dylan as “the best ballad singer I’d ever heard in my life” can no longer break hearts with his rendition of ‘The Dutchman’, but he still jumps to his feet and offers tea.
“I’ve had to stop singing altogether,” he says, without a note of self-pity. “I got a virus out in California which has left me with pulmonary fibrosis, a terrible thing, the scarring of the lungs. I only have 45% capacity left. There’s not a damned thing they can do about it. And the drugs I have to take – steroids and stuff – for some reason they go straight to the larynx, which makes you hoarse. It’s an assault on all fronts. It has played merry hell with me.”
These days he takes solace in words rather than music.
“Music and performance are the same thing for me,” he says, cheerfully. “I love the stories. I’m as happy as a poem with a song.”
Liam Clancy, as we come to understand from Alan Gilsenan’s excellent new documentary portrait The Yellow Bittern, has always been a troubadour, an unexpected guest. Born into a thoroughly musical household – mother loved a sing-song, dad was an opera fan – the young Liam was a creative fellow, painting, writing, designing theatre sets and acting in dramatic productions in his native Carrick-on-Suir.
“It’s all a mask, you know”, he notes. “I was a nervous young fellow and I still am. I can walk on a stage and assume the mantle of somebody else’s words, no problem. But in doing that I’m shielding myself.”
His career was entirely accidental. Looking like a movie star during an era when being Irish meant being 4 ft tall with Rickets, he attracted the unlikely attentions of a Guggenheim heiress in late 1955.
“Diane Hamilton, a woman from America came to Ireland collecting folk music,” recalls Mr. Clancy. “So I was helping her lug the heavy equipment. It turned out she took a shine to me. I didn’t quite know what was happening. She was an older woman from New York, twice divorced. And she took me to America. I was a 20 year-old kid from this medieval town and I’m transported to New York. It was unreal. Where I was from, nothing had changed since the Middle Ages. Here I am at the cutting edge of freedom, of art, of escape from the Ireland of the time which was run by Ayatollahs.”
He intended to be an actor on Broadway but fate had other plans. The peculiar alchemy that happened when Tommy Makem, brothers Paddy and Tom, and young Liam Clancy took the stage would soon catch a wave as the sixties folk revival took Greenwich Village by storm. Bob Dylan was a regular in the crowd and would borrow the melody of ‘Brennan On The Moor’ for his song ‘Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie’.
“I haven’t seen Dylan in a long while,” says Mr. Clancy. “We did that tribute concert in Madison Square Garden in 1992. And we were at a party that Bono had. It was one of those nights where you end up staying up until six in the morning just reminiscing about old times. At one point, Bono was hovering and he says ‘I’m staying away from you guys. All of your friends are dead’!”
Those trademark Aran jumpers, knitted by an aunt so that they wouldn’t catch their cold in the winters of North America, have often been derided for their Stage Oirishness. To be fair, there’s nothing to distinguish this sixties wave of Cool Hibernia from its British equivalent some three decades later.
“I remember we were playing in the Royal Albert Hall,” he recalls. “And there was this guy on the door who said ‘Good Morning, Mr. Patrick’ every time I passed. When I got into conversation with the others it turned out he said ‘Good Morning, Mr. Patrick’ to all of us. It was his little way of saying ‘You Paddy’. It was completely different in America in the '60s. There was an Irish president in the White House. Being Irish opened doors.”
The new documentary, he says, could not have come at a better time: “I remember reading the poet Nikos Kazantzakis, who wrote Zorba The Greek. In a preface to one of his books he said that when a man dies a particular vision of life, which is his and his alone, dies with him. It therefore behooves every man to tell his story. It was just about the same time I came across the grave of a man called William Clancy. So I was looking at this grave with my name on it – dated September 1735, 200 years exactly before I was born – and I realised that nobody would ever know anything about this man or any of the intimate details that made up his life. The comings and goings, the nitty gritty. That’s when I started thinking about writing some things down. That’s when I started thinking about the importance of recording things.”
The Clancys and Mr. Makem would drift in and out of various incarnations over the decades, but the death of Tommy Makem in 2007 has left Liam “the last man standing” as he puts it.
“It’s a strange sensation,” he confides. “Suddenly standing alone on a stage. In the film they all appear in the ether, like smoke sculptures. I don’t think some of the wives are too happy about the portrayals. But it all happened that way.”
The Last Man Standing has, happy to report, developed a fine gallows sense of humour about his predicament.
“When I used to sing ‘The Dutchman’ I used to think about this old couple you’d see in the town. He had Alzheimer’s and they’d lead each other around the streets. When they passed on, I had to find another old couple to think about when I was singing the song, so I could really feel the words. But I only realised recently, that now I’m thinking about myself and the wife. We’re the ones shuffling about now.”