About the Book
In this long overdue first full-length biography about the Clancy Brothers, you, the reader, will be taken on an eighty year journey from their upbringing in the mid-20th century Ireland to when they went on to great fame and fortune in America and Ireland in the 1960s, quickly becoming the most famous four Irishmen in the world, even topping the Beatles on the charts at various points. They were the band President John F. Kennedy praised on numerous occasions and Bob Dylan referred to Liam Clancy as "the best ballad singer I'd ever heard in my life."
Left to Right: Tommy Makem, Paddy, Tom and Liam Clancy on Hootenanny, 1963
Along with their friend Tommy Makem, the original lineup of Paddy, Tom and Liam Clancy formed in March 1956, fifty years ago. They took the world by storm on an unprecedented eighteen minute appearance on TheEd Sullivan Show in 1961. They were signed by Columbia Records immediately and released numerous best selling albums and singles over the next ten years, in addition to performing on every major radio and television talk show in America and on their own concert specials in Ireland and England.
Seeing several inevitable personnel changes in their decades together, including "the other brother" Bobby Clancy, their nephew Robbie O'Connell and the formation of the most sought after Irish music duo in the 1980s, Makem & Clancy, the group always stayed on top, playing to packed houses wherever they went, even into the 1990s after over forty years together.
The Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem & Robbie O'Connell: The Men Behind the Sweaters describes the events of the fifty year career of this prestigious group in detail never written before, as well as the personal lives of each main group member from the time they were born to the untimely passing of Tom Clancy in 1990, followed by Paddy in 1998 and Bobby in 2002. Further fleshing out the story of the Clancy Brothers are over three hundred photographs of "the boys," many of which have rarely been seen.
On this, their fiftieth anniversary in March 2006, take pleasure in reading this celebration of one of the first and undoubtedly the most influential Irish band that the world has ever seen.