The Mountain of the Women: Memoirs of an Irish Troubadour
by Liam Clancy

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Book Reviews of The Mountain of the Women: Memoirs of an Irish Troubadour

Book Review: There's no raconteur like an Irish raconteur...
Summary: 5 Stars

An idyllic setting, interrupted one day by the arrival of one world-weary American heiress with a hidden agenda. She's determined to travel the world collecting folk music with the young Liam as her assistant. But can it be, she wants to snag him and possess him as her own--much as Dido, the evil queen of Homeric legend, attempted to do to Ulysses? And if so, could you blame her? This kid's a natural: a real Irish choirboy with an old-world brogue and a penchant for reciting poetry. He obviously needs seducing.

Ah, Liam, me boy, you're in for a bumpy ride... or rather, a picaresque romp from the footlights of backstage Dublin to the hollers of Appalachia, on to Cambridge, Mass., and New York's zany, East Village arts "scene," where you'll meet everybody who's anybody. And, every once in a while, right back home to Carrick again, trailing clouds of cultural alienation. And great green gobs of maternal disapprobation.

There are enough imbedded elements of Tom Jones that one could easily conclude this has just got to be fiction. So it's well the author pinches us awake, as social injustice, poverty, narrow-mind religious judgementalism, moral hypocrisy and intellectual vapidity present themselves. Not that any of that stops our hero.

As he describes becoming a force to be reckoned with-first on the stage, and then in popular music-Liam Clancy is forthright about a few gaffs and stumbles. The hardest to swallow-given the idealization of family that serves as oxygen during his early life-is brief, bitter mention of a daughter, the product of an early relationship, whom he largely declined to be a father to. An included photograph of the author, posed beside this beautiful child, is simply disturbing.

As the memoir ends, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem are just about to reach the inexplicable pinnacle of fame as accidental musicians. A bit unsettled by the nutty East Village scene, our boys momentarily return to the village of their roots-where the local townfolk haven't changed a bit-they are, as ever, totally insane. Back they go to New York.

The reader senses the chronicle ahead. . . Fame is fleeting, the singing group will eventually tire of life on the road, and, after all, to many amps can you crank a pennywhistle before someone's sinus linings hit a harmonic? One prays for Volume Two, wherein Liam, classical hero that we know him to be, crowns life's journey with maturity and self-knowledge, and expiates a life of fond transgressions by founding his own rollicking, loving Celtic dynasty. Of course, Volume 2 will need to be as thoughtful, resonant, funny and well-crafted as the present work, so that the reading of Liam's life remains in keeping with the living of it.

Summary of The Mountain of the Women: Memoirs of an Irish Troubadour

Music Books

• Books > Subjects > Arts & Photography
• Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Composers & Musicians > Country & Folk
• Ethnic & National > Irish
• Memoirs
• Specific Groups > Women