Hoisting a Few with the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem and Bob Dylan

With St. Patrick’s Day in mind, here’s a dynamite clip about the mutual admiration between The Clancy Brothers and the decidedly non-Irish Bob Dylan, compiled from a 1984 Clancy Bros. documentary and the 2005 Dylan doc No Direction Home.


Young Bob Dylan was heavily influenced by the Clancys and freely admits to imitating Liam Clancy’s ballad-singing style on his first LP. Dylan calls Liam, who passed away last December, “the best ballad singer I ever heard.” Here is a rare recording from 1960 of Dylan covering the Clancy’s “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye.”


The Clancy Brothers and Makem, in turn, covered several Dylan songs over the years. Most notably “When the Ship Comes In,” which sounds like a readymade Irish drinking song, even though Dylan wrote it in 1964 about being unallowed to stay in a hotel due to his tramp-like vagabond appearance.

I was fortunate enough to see the Clancy Bros and Tommy Makem cover the tune at the BobFest tribute concert at Madison Square Garden way back in 1992.


Much to the consternation of many music-biz bigwigs and hangers-on, Dylan insisted that the BobFest afterparty would be held not at a huge club but at Tommy Makem’s Irish Pavilion, a bar on East 57th Street. This insured that the party was limited to true VIPs like performers George Harrison, Neil Young, Eddie Vedder and of course the Clancys. That must have been some party.


Cheers! And remember