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The Dady Brothers, Irish Music, and the Power of Place in Postwar America

The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem were central figures in the revival of traditional Irish music in postwar America and Ireland. Liam Clancy, the charismatic front man of the group, concludes his memoir The Mountain of the Women (2002) by reflecting, somewhat ironically, on the decisive question posed by his initial brush with fame and fortune in the early 1960s: should he return to small-town Ireland, with all its provincial lunacy, or remain in cosmopolitan New York, with all the bohemian lunacy of Greenwich Village where he and his brothers first made their mark?1 Clancy’s dilemma was a starker version of the one facing the generation of Irish Americans who came of age in the decades following World War II: whether to stay in the old ethnic urban villages or leave for the “wider” worlds of 1950s suburbia or 1960s counter culture. Clancy chose Greenwich Village—a ticket out of Old-World provincialism that nonetheless required him to spend a career singing folk songs that celebrated the life of the world he had left. Most Irish Americans of his generation also chose some version of the wider world: with perhaps more sentiment than irony, many Irish Americans found in traditional Irish music—from the Clancy Brothers to the Chieftains to Riverdance—a way to connect to Irish culture free from the traditional social constraints that historically shaped that culture. Still, reports of ethnic fade have been greatly exaggerated. Many Irish continued to live in the old urban enclaves well into the late 1970s and the revival of traditional Irish music was an essential component of the broader ethnic revival that emerged in post-1960s America.2 The local dimension of this revival is well illuminated by looking at the life and career of the Dady Brothers, a duo based in Rochester, New York. Far from the great Irish music centers of New York,