Publishers
Weekly December 24, 2001
It
is difficult to imagine now how innocent a twenty-year-old boy could
be in a small town in Ireland in the fifties, but I had one foot in
the twentieth century, the other in the Middle Ages,” writes Clancy
in this entertaining memoir. But times change, and by the end of the
book he is living in Greenwich Village, watching gay men kiss on the
street and listening to the young Bob Dylan play in coffeehouses until
he becomes a cultural phenomenon himself as one of the famous Irish
folk music group, the Clancy Brothers.
In
the first half of this autobiography, Clancy describes his childhood
in a small Irish town, the 11th child of a loving family who attend
strict Catholic school and rabble-roused with his friends. There are
moving scenes—the death of his older sister from TB and his mother’s
crisis of faith—but his story really takes off when he gets a small
part in Cyril Cusack’s celebrated production of The Playboy of the Western
World. He met Diane Guggenheim, who was collecting Irish folk songs,
and eventually went to New York, where with Guggenheim money they started
Tradition Records to record folk music. Clancy’s style is mirthful and
funny, and while the chronology is sometimes difficult to follow, it
is the storytelling, not the story itself, that impresses.
The
book’s second half is filled with fascinating sketches and portraits
of the incredible arts scene in New York and Boston at the time—the
famed Poet’s Theater in Cambridge, Mass. ; Jose Quintero’s renowned
production of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow ; and Lenny Bruce—that
is both lovingly evocative and engrossing. There is so much great material
here that the memoir, at times, feels cursory, but what it lacks in
detail it makes up in charm.
