I'm trying to figure out why I am attracted to Irish family memoirs. Maybe it's because I come from a family whose reunion, if we ever had one, wouldn't draw enough people to fill a football backfield.

I married into an immense extended family, one that stretches across the country and back to the Revolutionary War. When THAT family got together for a reunion we had enough cousins and nephews and uncles and aunts to fill both sides of a softball game, with plenty of people left over to watch.

Last week during the St. Patrick's Day revels I read The Mountain of the Women, Memoirs of an Irish Troubador, written by Liam Clancy of the folk-singing Clancy Brothers.

Liam Clancy grew up impoverished in southern Ireland and came to America in the 1950's, following his two brothers into an acting career in New York.

The Clancy Brothers and their friends already were singing in pubs after shows and carousing everywhere before they discovered, as Liam relates, there was more money in singing than in acting. Gradually they evolved into the sweater-clad group that reintroduced Americans to Irish folk songs and paved the way for the ethnic and folk music boom that followed in the 1960's.

Liam Clancy is not a professional writer -- this is his first published book -- but he must have one heck of an excellent editor, because his story reads absorbingly well. It's a young man's tale told by an old man of sixty.

As Clancy tells it, he was lying in a hospital bed in Ireland "because my sixtieth birthday party was full of song and food and music and drink... At some point in the night... I saw someone dive into the swimming pool outside, and since it was my birthday, I dressed appropriately, in my birthday suit, and declaimed:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

"With that I plunged into the lung-chilling water. Excess, I'm afraid, has always been one of the little failings of my life. With a lung full of pneumonia, the oxygen hissing through my mask and the antibiotics coursing through my veins, I ruminate upon it all."

The title of the book derives from a mountain called Slievenamon, which in Gaelic translates as the mountain of the women. "My blood tells me that my origins are there," Clancy writes. Later he remarks that the book could have been titled "The Mounting of the Women" based on his youthful adventures in Greenwich Village in the 1950's.

Wonderfully funny and offbeat stories abound. The Mountain of the Women may surprise fans of the music, because most of the tale takes place before the group was famous and playing places like the Ed Sullivan Show and Carnegie Hall. It's not so much a memoir of performance as a coming of age story played out on both sides of the Atlantic.

One night in New York a close friend, Grania O'Malley, "invited a bunch of us up to her apartment for a disposing-of-her-husband's-ashes party. She'd married this actor years before but soon discovered he was gay. In his will he had asked if Grania would spread his ashes on the Hudson River along his favorite walk.

"It was a great party. I remember a big bottle of Paddy's whiskey on the mantelpiece beside the urn. The Paddy whiskey label has a map of Ireland on it.

"'When we get down as far as the Shannon,' Grania announced, 'we'll head for the Hudson.'

"We drained the bottle as far as the Shannon, then the Suir and down to the Blackwater. When we arrived back up at Belfast Lough on the second bottle, I said to Grania, 'The tide's going out. Hadn't we better do the deed?'

"By now midnight was long gone. The party was in full roar... Grania winked at me and, taking the urn, beckoned me to go with her.

"Dumping the ashes into the toilet, she said, 'I hate to ruin a good party.' She flushed the toilet and we watched in silence as the husband began to spin and then disappear down the hole. 'The miserable bastard. He'll be in the Hudson in about five minutes!'"

Put The Rising of the Moon or Finnigan's Wake on the turntable, pour yourself a cold one, and dig into this highly satisfying memoir.

Aired Friday March 22, 2002 at 8:55 am and Sunday March 24, 2002 at 10:55 am

Orders/Information:

The Mountain of the Women, Memoirs of an Irish Troubador by Liam Clancy. Doubleday hard cover $24.95 ISBN 0385502044

NOTES:

The Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem are recorded on more than 40 different albums. If you look them up on http://www.towerrecords.com you can listen to short excerpts from many of these, using the Windows Media Player that comes with most new computers these days.

You might also search that site for the label Tradition Records. This was a private company funded by Liam's friend Diane (Guggenheim) Hamilton that recorded folk music of Appalachia and Ireland in the field. Liam tells a lot of stories in his memoir that relate to the making of these recordings. You can listen to or purchase Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachian Mountains and others.