I am one of John todhunters great granddaughters, and I am very proud and humbled by this beautiful song that he wrote and Liam Clanceys voice. Thank you whoever put this on youtube
This song will always remind me of my father, I remember him sitting alone in his attic room listening to Liam Clancy records and playing this song over . May God be good to them both.
I get so sad listening to this song. It always makes me sad that the young people of Ireland have forgotten our turbulent history. The Clancy Brothers were a major part in my life. I did not know them but I remember times in London in the 80s and they always made me feel proud to be Irish, especially Liam. Their music and songs were beautiful. Liam could bring life to a Poem as if something that were dead rose again. I cry now sometimes listening looking back at my own life and remembering my friends and family who have passed away like the Clancys. I will never forget walking in to the Pubs in North London on a Friday evening with a Tape of the Clancys blaring. RIP
Sounds like you need to get out and about more, because the young people of Ireland have certainly not forgotten our history. In fact they constantly amaze me with their love of their culture, with so many of them playing and singing the old historical songs. Your "woe is me" is completely out of place and (excuse me for being blunt) a little pathetic. Why not do some searches here on RU-vid for any old Irish historical song you choose and you will find endless examples of young Irish people in bands travelling around Ireland and the world spreading their love for their culture. If you were immersed in your own culture you would already know this. So maybe it's yourself that you should be complaining about? 💚☘
Fondest memory of all the Clancy brothers and Tommy Makem was on a Sunday night at a local Irish dance hall in Richmond, Melbourne, circa 1964. Nearing the end of the evenings dance and music, the Clancy's and Tommy entered the hall, unannounced, having come from their concert earlier in the Melbourne Town Hall, running up to the stage they concluded the evening with renditions of their most popular songs. What a finale that proved to be. Sure it was the talk of Melbourne town.May all the Clancy Brothers And Tommy Makem R.I.P. Thank you for your music.
I think you have the venue incorrect. I remember seeing them at St Georges Hall, Carlton, Melbourne in about 1964ish after a concert. We used to have the Irish dances and social meetings in that place on a Sunday night after watching the hurling or Gaelic football matches at Albert Park on Sunday afternoon. Their Aran jumpers became very popular in Australia at that time. Those were great days
I seen both Liam Clancy and Tommy Makem in concert in Dublin in the 1980s and i must say it was a very memorable show they put on two legends in their own right.
There I covered him with fern and I piled on him a cairn, like an Irish king he sleeps in Aghadoe. ( a cairn is a gathering of stones, used a marker, in this case a grave). So beautiful. Thank you for posting.x
The name of John Todhunter, poet and composer, is all but forgotten in Ireland today, nearly a century after his death. But thanks to Liam Clancy, at least one of his songs lives on. If you don’t know Clancy’s version of Aghadoe, look it up on RU-vid. It demonstrates why Bob Dylan considered him the greatest of all ballad singers. The combined effect of his voice and Todhunter’s words is such that, unless you’ve had the back of your neck shaved recently, it’ll make the hairs stand on it. I don’t know if the event described in the lyric was based on any real-life story. It’s a 1798 ballad, narrated by a bereaved female, about a rebel lover hidden, betrayed, and executed. But I suspect that the name Aghadoe, hypnotically repeated throughout, was chosen only for its mellifluence. And as sung by Clancy at least, it helps make the song almost a lullaby. His version is also, by the way, an example of the power of good editing. In Todhunter’s original, there’s a verse naming the traitor - the woman’s brother - and showering curses on him. And even the curses are poetic. But Clancy wisely omits them. Instead, in four elliptical verses, his song moves gently and elegiacally from love to loss, to what we would today call the grieving process. Thus, the prelude to the dead lover’s burial includes the lines: “I walked from Mallow town to Aghadoe, Aghadoe/I took his head from the gaol gate to Aghadoe...” Which might look like a grisly detail in cold print, but not in song. In Todhunter’s words, as mediated by Clancy, the bringing home of the severed head is an act of tenderness. The song’s lullaby quality somehow survives it intact. Mind you, I only chanced on Clancy’s recording a few months ago, not long after seeing a desperately sad but beautiful film called Ida. This had nothing to do with Aghadoe, nor with Ireland. In fact, it may have had the least promising scenario of any film I’ve ever attended - being about the spiritual struggles a young nun in postwar communist Poland, shot in black and white. But it was a masterpiece nonetheless. And in case any of you still plan to catch up with it somewhere, I won’t say anything here other than this. There’s a scene in it reminiscent of the last verse of Aghadoe - if it doesn’t make you cry, you’re already dead. Getting back to Liam Clancy, I’m not alone in admiring his treatment of the song. Among the many posthumous tributes paid him back in 2010 was a recollection by his nephew, Robbie O’Connell, of a recording session they had done together in Kildare some years before. The various performers, including the Irish Philharmonic Orchestra, were working on a collection of 1798 songs, to mark the bicentenary, and took a break for lunch. And as they were eating sandwiches, reading newspapers, etc, Clancy sang Aghadoe, to electrifying effect. “When he finished,” recalled O’Connell, “there was just stunned silence for about 10 seconds. Then all the musicians, they all stood up, and gave him a standing ovation . . . it would give you goosebumps. I had never seen anything like it.” Todhunter must have written the ballad when under the influence of the Gaelic literary revival, to which he was an early recruit. Early for the movement, that is, not for him. Born to a Dublin Quaker family in 1839, he was a contemporary of WB Yeats’s father, rather than of the poet. But in the 1890s, when they were both in London, Yeats jnr converted him to the cause of writing Irish literature in English. Unfortunately, as the younger poet saw it, the conversion wasn’t permanent. Todhunter continued to have a weakness for Ibsenite drama, in which he did not flourish. His 1893 tragedy, A Black Cat, was performed for one night only. A follow-up called A Comedy of Sighs played to a chorus of jeers. WB recalled the author sitting in the theatre stoically, throughout all four acts, “listening to the howling of his enemies, while his friends slipped out one by one”. Had Todhunter been committed to any cause strongly enough, Yeats believed, he might have become famous. He had, for example, on “some casual patriotic impulse” (Yeats’s words) written “certain excellent verses now in all Irish anthologies”. But his flaw was that he never persisted with any one thing. He was considered a literary failure by the turn of the new century, and lived his later years out of the public eye before dying, with somewhat ironic timing, in 1916. www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/rebel-balladeer-without-a-cause-an-irishman-s-diary-about-john-todhunter-1.2094459 @FrankmcnallyIT(Irish Times 2015-02- 07)
My humble words of appreciation matter naught in the grand scheme.Hearing deeply the words and the voice that expresses that deepness I am enthralled in the history of British rule over freedom desiring people for no other reason that this was their land by rights.We are all caught up in present events about to turn this world again tipsy turvy.This man implores songwriters to take heed and make known the peril of the free world against Isis and their ilk.Peter behind my
My great grandfather came to Timaru NZ in 1862 and when through hard work he bought his own farm he named it" Aghadoe"after we were told the valley where he was born
Amazingly was never familiar with this until heard it on Late Date Recently.What a beautiful haunting song.Really tugs the heartstrings. Nicholas Parker
Liam voice always affected me no matter which song he sang. But when I hear him sing now I find myself grief-stricken since. He was a wonderful performer Greatly missed RIP