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Liam Clancy's death echoes on Boston's Irish music scene

E-mail|Link|Comments () December 5, 2009 02:33 PM

Globe File Photo

Liam Clancy in performance

By Emma Rose Johnson, Globe Correspondent

In pubs all across the Boston area, members of the small, tight-knit community of Irish folk musicians are mourning the death of one of their icons.

Liam Clancy, who died Friday of pulmonary fibrosis, was the last surviving member of the Clancy Brothers folk band. The band's renditions of Irish rebel songs and ballads epitomized the Irish character and influenced the current Irish folk scene in Boston.

Larry Reynolds, a fiddler and founder of the Boston Chapter of the Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann, an organization for Irish musicians, said Clancy’s loss is a huge blow to the art form.

“He performed quite a bit in this area, and he had a great impact,” Reynolds said. “He meant an awful lot to the people here.”

During the folk music revival of the 1960s, Clancy and his band performed in pubs all over New England. In an area filled with Irish immigrants and their descendants, Clancy’s shows were not just opportunities to hear good music -- they were a way of reconnecting with Irish roots.

“The Irish tend to be very nostalgic,” said Reynolds. “He would bring [Ireland] home to them.”

When asked if musicians were planning a tribute to him in the coming weeks, Reynolds said that Clancy’s influence on the Boston Irish music scene is inescapable.

“No matter what seisiun you’re at, you’ll hear a song that he made famous,” he said. “It’ll continue in the coming weeks and the coming months, guaranteed.”