The Mountain of the Women:
Memoirs of an Irish Troubadour
By Liam Clancy
Doubleday, $24.95
ISBN 0385502044

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Memories of a music legend

It has been six years since the riotous success of Angela's Ashes -- probably not too soon to begin paraphrasing Frank McCourt: happy childhoods are hardly worth our while. It's the miserable childhood we're interested in, and what's better than the miserable Irish childhood? Well, the miserable Irish childhood that leads to a young manhood as an actor and folk music star, I guess.

The Mountain of the Women is the story of Willie Clancy, who grew up in Carrick-on-Suir in the shadows of a mountain called Slievenamon and how he transformed himself into Liam Clancy, a music legend. It's an Irish story, to be sure, a tale of poverty and drink, of repression and exultation, stumbling courtships and boisterous singing. It's the archetypal Irish Catholic history, filled with the terrors of confession and first holy communion, set in a geography Joyce called a priest-ridden country. But it's an especially American story, as well, a Horatio Alger tale of pluck and luck that starts in a garret and ends up on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Most of us know Liam Clancy as a founding member of the band the Clancy Brothers, but this memoir describes another Clancy, a young man who came to music like someone sidling onto a barstool. He started out wanting to be a filmmaker and an actor. At first, his career was fueled by the twice-divorced and mentally unstable Diane Guggenheim, who acted as patron and harridan at the same time, leading him around the British Isles, the mountains of North Carolina and the narrow passageways of Greenwich Village, nurturing his love of folk music and shaking his balance.

Along the way to becoming a folk music legend, Clancy acted on television, in film and on Broadway. He spent a good deal of time making music, too, in such famous places as the White Horse Tavern and the Village Vanguard. He began to realize that money was in music -- as was his greatest passion. He discovered a way to keep his folk songs, his desire to perform and the poetry of his heritage intact. The Mountain of the Women casts a lovely shadow from Ireland to America and into some corners we might not expect.

Dr. Michael Pearson directs the creative writing program at Old Dominion University.