THE CLANCY BROTHERS & TOMMY MAKEM
DEREK BAILEY:
Do you think they were influential on your own career?BOB DYLAN:
Oh yeah, enormously so, because I was around them all the time and they just sang so many songs...
Derek Bailey Interview, Slane Castle, Ireland, 8 Jul 1984.
PAT CLANCY:
You want to know where Dylan got his stuff? There was a little folk club here in London, down in the basement; we sang in it one night... Anyway, Al Grossman paid somebody and gave them a tape-recorder, and every folk-singer that went up there was taped, and Bob Dylan got all those tapes...LIAM CLANCY:
Yes, and the tune of "Farewell"... because whoever was singing harmony was closer to the mike than the guy singing melody, and when [Dylan] wrote his version, he wrote it to the harmony not the melody line...Patrick Humphries Interview, reprinted in John Bauldie, Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan, London, 1992, pp. 50-51; originally published in The Telegraph 18 (Winter 1984).
Dylan's most famous borrowing from the Clancys was the melody from an Irish song "The Patriot Game" written by the Irish songwriter Dominic Behan, brother of Brendan Behan the writer. The melody is originally American. It appears in an Appalachian song "The Nightingale."Nuala O'Connor, Bringing It All Back Home: The Influence of Irish Music, BBC Books, 1991, p. 115.