"As I start my story I lie in a hospital bed because my sixtieth birthday party was full of song and food and music and drink....Excess, I'm afraid, has always been one of the little failings of my life." So begins Liam Clancy's uproarious memoir of a life lived fully, if not always well. Taking us through his birth as the eleventh child of a 47-year-old woman in the small town of Carrick in Ireland to the Clancy Brothers triumphant breakthrough appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show, " "The Mountain of the Women" is by turn hilarious and wistful, sad and naughty, and always filled with the wonder of a provincial young man let loose upon the world.Liam Clancy was an earnest, pious and aimless nineteen-year-old when he met Diane Guggenheim, an American heiress obsessed with regional folk music. She fell in love with young Liam and took with him on her journeys across the British Isles and American Appalachia. Her attempts at seduction failed because as Liam write "I had one foot in the 20th century, the other in the Middle Ages." He couldn't figure out why she kept climbing into his bed. When she took him to Greenwich Village, young Liam figured it out (though not with Diane Guggenheim -- she attempted suicide when he spurned her for another woman). His great goal was to become an actor, but the money was scarce and as a sideline he played in pubs like the legendary White Horse Tavern with his brothers and a countryman named Tommy Makem. Clancy's recounting of the late 1950s in Greenich Village is as raucous and eventful as his childhgood stories are sweet and naive; he behaved badly, but he had a grand time of it.
Aside from warmth, humor, charm and an ear for the great anecdote,Clancy's voice is irresistible because he never lets himself off the hook for his sins, and he's happy to view his success as a lark. The review for the first Clancy Brothers concert began "Three of the worst haircuts in show business opened at the Fate of Horn last night." It is a measure of Clancy's cheerful attitude that he is grateful to the reviewer for not mentioning the fact his pants kept falling down.
Aside from warmth, humor, charm and an ear for the great anecdote,Clancy's voice is irresistible because he never lets himself off the hook for his sins, and he's happy to view his success as a lark. The review for the first Clancy Brothers concert began "Three of the worst haircuts in show business opened at the Fate of Horn last night." It is a measure of Clancy's cheerful attitude that he is grateful to the reviewer for not mentioning the fact his pants kept falling down.