As Liam Clancy remembers it, being asked to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show did not seem like a big deal.
“We just did not understand the significance,” he told Irish America in a recent interview, during a publicity tour to promote a brilliant rerelease of The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem performing live at New York City’s Carnegie Hall in 1963.
Two years before that historic performance, as Clancy recalls, they were a group of slightly shady characters best known in that bohemian redoubt, Greenwich Village.
“Irish-Americans weren’t really interested in us,” said Liam, the youngest of the Clancy brothers. “Pete Seeger played with us. A lot of people said: ‘They’ve got a Communist up there.’ So most of our audience were folkies and liberal Jews.”