When Liam Clancy told his father he wanted to be an actor, the response was blunt: "Aren't there enough people in the world acting the goat without you joining them?"
His father, Bob, loved the theatre and especially Italian opera, but feared it was not a secure way to make a living. When his sons, the now famous Clancy Brothers, returned from the United States as recorded artists he was thrilled to be proved wrong.
Nearly five decades after the whole adventure began, Liam shows no sign of fatigue. "I feel better now than I did years ago." The idea that, at 66, he might retire to reflect on past glories is not one he could contemplate for a moment.
"There would be nothing more boring that to lean back on my oars and say 'I 've finished now'. I certainly will drop in harness."
He has, however, spent much of his recent past reflecting on a life which has taken him from Carrick-on-Suir in the 1950s to the Appalachian Mountains and on to New York city, later to Canada and back to Ireland, not to mention countless stop-offs on the way.
His memoir on the early part of that life, The Mountain of the Women, named after Slievenamon, has just been published, and he is currently working on the next instalment.
The first book chronicles his childhood in Carrick-on-Suir, his early career as an actor and how, as a member of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, he was prominent in the folk music revival in Greenwich Village in New York in the early 1960s.
It has been described by one American reviewer as a "sing-and-tell memoir, which is also drink-and-tell, with a good deal of that kissing stuff, too". He decided, he says, to write it all down following a party to mark his 60th birthday at his home in the Ring Gaeltacht in Co Waterford. At a late stage in the proceedings he stripped, appropriately, to his birthday suit, jumped into his swimming pool "and ended up with pneumonia".
While recovering in hospital he thought of a line from a song by his old friend, Bob Dylan, "He not busy bein' born is busy dyin". He decided if he wasn't dying he should get busy being born and, after getting out of hospital, bought himself a laptop and learned to type.
Another incident was equally seminal. "I was up in Kilcash in an old churchyard and I found a tombstone which had my name on it, William Clancy.
"He died in 1735, and I was born in 1935. And I was mad to know who my namesake was and what life was like in his time, but there was no way of knowing.
"So I said the same thing is not going to happen to me. I though of Nikos Kazantzakis, the Greek poet, who said one time: 'When a man dies, that particular vision of life which is his and his alone dies with him. It therefore behoves every man to tell his story', which I think is a wonderful concept."
He was surprised at the effect the writing of the book had on him. "As I let the screen draw me in, I remembered much more detail than I ever thought I knew. Some of it was very traumatic and there were a lot of wet pages from tears, from laughing at stories that came to me, and from so many things that I buried, like the death of my sister when I was just six months old.
"It came back to me exactly as my mother told me the story, and I couldn't even read it to my wife and kids because I get all choked up."
He realised in writing the story that he had carried "an immense baggage of anger", which took up an awful lot of energy. "And when I had written it I found the anger had evaporated." As well as continuing to write, he has several other projects on the go.
One is a plan to record an anthology of his favourite poetry at his recording studio in Ring, with musical accompaniment by his son Donal, who plays with the band Solas.
He has considered Ring to be his home since 1963 when he first bought a cottage there. Surprisingly, considering he is from the road in Carrick, he was introduced to the area by the late Ciarán Burke of The Dubliners.
He was also friendly with Luke Kelly and wrote a moving tribute for a commemorative event held at the singer's graveside in Glasnevin three years ago. "And when in the future," it concluded, "there are those who want to hear, not the froth of fashion in the pop song of the month, but the timeless vision of the true story told, they will listen to you, Lukey - you and your likes, if there are such."