The Yellow Bittern – The Life & Times of Liam Clancy (Director: Alan Gilsenan)

Copyright Crossing the Line 2009

Completed shortly before he died, this feature-length film about folk singer Liam Clancy presents a revealing portrait of the man whom Bob Dylan called, “just the best ballad singer I’d ever heard in my whole life.”

This intimate, confessional, and highly cinematic film charts the remarkable rise to fame of The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, from their small-town beginnings in Co. Tipperary to the folk heyday of Greenwich Village in the 1960s, where they absorbed black musical influences, played for John F. Kennedy, and outsold the Beatles. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem would go on to influence a host of popular artists from Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger to The Pogues, and would become a powerful, iconic presence on the Irish cultural map. This documentary unveils the darker side of the man hailed by Bob Dylan as the greatest ballad singer of all time.

‘Liam Clancy is an icon. Irish people, thousands of them pack out every concert he plays and believe they know where Liam has come from, and what he’s about… but they don’t know the half of it’. Alan Gilsenan;

Directed by acclaimed film-maker Alan Gilsenan, this biographical film reveals the true Liam Clancy. The film won the title of ‘Best Documentary’ at the Irish Film & Television Awards in 2000.