Tommy Makem

Tommy Makem, an Irish folk-singer, died on August 1st 2007, aged 74

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.

Mrs Green from along the street would join in too, until the house became a regular ceilidh at times and collectors would come, even from America, to write the songs down. 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 ofthe 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.