The 60th birthday of Bob Dylan has provoked all sorts of talk, but, as is to be expected with one of music's genuine mysteries, much of it has been little more than fantasy and wild speculation - the great man's later life is a true imponderable to just about everyone. But whatever about Dylan today, those early Greenwich Village days seem to have been rather less complex, and trustworthy witnesses still exist to shed some light on them with anecdotes and re-constructions.
But perhaps more valuable again than any of these garbled gospels are recollections of the times themselves - great days when Zimmy first arrived in New York and tailed the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem from the White Horse as far as the bridge of Toome.
The received wisdom is that the Clancys were the first Irish band to go to the US and crack it, but the reality is that they were made in the US itself - they were up, running and extremely famous in the US before anybody at home had even noticed them missing.
Paddy and Tom Clancy went out first and tried their hand as actors by renting out the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York. Their first production was a success but soon, to counteract the failure of the second, they began doing midnight concerts with folk and blues acts such as Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.
Meanwhile back in Ireland, Diane Hamilton of the Guggenheim family had arrived to collect folk music. She recorded Liam Clancy in Carrick-on-Suir and then, following the route of Jean Ritchie, she headed for Keady to meet the singer Sarah Makem. It was there that Liam Clancy, who was carrying Hamilton's equipment, first met Sarah's son, Tommy. By 1956, the Clancys and Tommy Makem had all arrived, by different routes, in New York city. And fairly soon they would have it by the throat.
"Before I went to America, I wasn't singing at all," says Liam. "In fact, the first thing I ever sang was on the recording that Diane Hamilton made, The Lark in the Morning. And with those tapes she formed Tradition Records and Paddy took over as head of the label. We made our first album up in Kenny Goldstein's kitchen and to our amazement people began to buy it - people who had never heard these kind of songs sung in a ballsy unison, four guys belting it out, before." As the records became known, invitations began to arrive for these exotic Irish singers to perform in pubs. But still thinking of themselves as actors at this stage, they declined all offers until they realised that it made commercial sense. As Liam recalls, he discovered that the union rate for actors was $40 off-Broadway, but that he and Makem could earn $125 each playing The Fifth Peg (later Gerde's Folk City) for a week.
And so when the other Clancy Brothers had a night off from their own jobs they would join them on stage and soon a formidable stage group developed. The fact that they were, in reality, a group of actors is perhaps what set them so far apart.
"Yes, it was very important in terms of the delivery. We certainly acted out the songs, but more importantly than that, because we were so immersed in theatre, we had the feel of how an evening should build. We realised that to hold a stage was the important thing for us. It was less important to be reciting someone else's lines than to be in control yourself for the whole night and we were still able to include poetry, drama and recitations as mood pieces to set up songs."
But for all the Yeats and Oscar Wilde, the enduring image of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem remains that of the rowdy, pub-singing balladeers. Clancy accepts the power of that image but attributes it more to the many sound-a-like groups which followed them. "They found it so easy to sing the raucous songs," he says, "but it didn't take any talent or any finesse." And it is unfortunate that this is the image they were stuck with because they were genuine musical pioneers.
"When we did it, we weren't following anybody. There was no foundation, we were flying by the seat of our pants. For example, when we were trying to get a handle on a song called Brennan on the Moor, I really wanted to get the rhythm of a galloping horse into the song, and that big deep couch I was sitting on was bouncing up and down chung-chucka-chucka-chucka-chung, and then Pete Seeger just started playing the banjo and driving that horse along. And that's the way most of our material emerged. Seat of our pants."
Greenwich Village itself played a role in the music, as it set the Clancys and Makem apart from many of the New York Irish. They moved in very different circles and played in very different places. They opened for Josh White at No 1 Sheridan Square, the old Cafe Society where Billie Holiday had performed. They interrupted one of their own shows to allow Barbra Streisand her first 10-minute spot, and afterwards they drank in the White Horse where Dylan Thomas had taken his famous final shot.
"In the beginning, we didn't have an Irish audience at all. Our first audience in Carnegie Hall was almost totally liberal Jews and that's because Pete Seeger was playing with us - a communist, blacklisted by McCarthy. The Irish audience resisted what we were doing because of Pete Seeger. We also did a tour around New England for CORE, the Congress for Racial Equality, and then we couldn't play any of those cities again for about five or six years.
"The blacks wouldn't come out to see whitey and the Irish wouldn't come out to see these nigger-lovers. So we were coming from a whole different situation and we just hated the stuff that was trotted out in the Irish dancehalls. We avoided them like the plague." The New York Irish did come to accept them eventually, however. An appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show was, as Clancy puts it, "like getting the blessing of the Pope", and soon the Irish audience began to come out in numbers.
Now hugely successful and playing in venues such as Carnegie Hall, they lived "purely on adrenalin and couldn't wait to get off the stage to get to the party". And what added greatly to the general atmosphere was the massive impact of the folk boom. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem were hardly protest folkies but they were definitely identified with rebellion. It gave them an added edge and soon the young Bob Dylan came to listen and to learn.
"He was so pretty and so young back then. The first time I saw him I didn't know if he was a boy or a girl. He was a real fidgety youth. He moved from one foot to the other and his mind was racing, racing, racing.
"He was into every thing and I described him one time as blotting paper soaking up the blues, rock 'n' roll, whatever was happening.
"There was a guy called Bob Shelton, the music critic of the New York Times, and he took him under his wing and saw the potential in this young fella. He brought him to every one of our concerts and told him to watch us, that we were the guys who knew how to do it. I was the closest in age to Dylan and we used to hang out together. In fact we shared the same girlfriend - without my knowing it - and he finally confessed to me years later..."
That confession emerged in 1992 after a concert at Madison Square to celebrate Dylan's 30 years in the business. Dylan insisted that the post-concert gathering be shifted from the Waldorf-Astoria to Tommy Makem's Irish Pavilion and it was there that the Village veterans finally got to talk about the old days. "And all he wanted to do," says Clancy, "was sit and talk with me about the Village and the girlfriends and the songs. At some point in the night I picked up a guitar and started singing Roddy McCorley and I forgot the second verse - I'd had too much to drink - and I handed Dylan the guitar. He said no, he couldn't play it, but I said: 'Don't give me that, Dylan! You can't tell that to Liam Clancy!' And so he picked up the guitar and sang the rest of Roddy McCorley. It was wonderful."