Folk Musicians from Northern Ireland - Tommy Makem, Sarah Makem, Paddie Bell (Paperback)

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Not illustrated. Excerpt: Thomas 'Tommy' Makem (November 4, 1932 August 1, 2007) was an internationally celebrated Irish folk musician, artist, poet and storyteller, best known as a member of The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. He played the long-necked 5-string banjo, guitar, tin whistle, and bagpipes, and sang in a distinctive baritone. He was sometimes known as "The Bard of Armagh" (taken from a traditional song of the same name) and "The Godfather of Irish Music". Makem was born and raised in Darkley, County Armagh (the "Hub of the Universe" as Makem always said), in Northern Ireland. His mother, Sarah Makem, was a successful folk singer, as well as an important source of traditional Irish music, who was visited and recorded by, among others, Diane Guggenheim Hamilton, Jean Ritchie, Peter Kennedy and Sean O'Boyle. His father, Peter Makem, was also a fiddler and piper who played the buss drum in a local band named "Oliver Plunkett", after a martyr of the Cromwell age. His brother and sister were folk musicians also. Young Tommy Makem, from the age of 8, was member of the St. Patrick's church choir for 15 years where he sang Gregorian chant and motets. He didn't learn to read music but he made it in his "own way".He started to work at 14 as a clerk in a garage and later he worked for a while as a barman at Mone's Bar, a local pub and as a local correspondent for The Armagh Observer. He emigrated to the United States in 1955, carrying his few possessions and a set of bagpipes (from his time in a pipe band). He went to work in a mill in Dover, New Hampshire; but in 1956, a mill accident crushed his hand. With his arm in a sling, he sought out the Clancy Brothers in New York to make music. The Clancys were signed to Columbia Records in 1961. The same... More: http://booksllc.net/?id=1597259