A magnificent voice never to be equalled. As Bob Dylan said, the best ballad singer he ever heard,

I get so sad listening to this song. It always makes me sad that the young people of Ireland have forgotten our turbulent history. The Clancy Brothers were a major part in my life. I did not know them but I remember times in London in the 80s and they always made me feel proud to be Irish, especially Liam. Their music and songs were beautiful. Liam could bring life to a Poem as if something that were dead rose again. I cry now sometimes listening looking back at my own life and remembering my friends and family who have passed away like the Clancys. I will never forget walking in to the Pubs in North London on a Friday evening with a Tape of the Clancys blaring. RIP

I am one of John todhunters great granddaughters, and I am very proud and humbled by this beautiful song that he wrote and Liam Clanceys voice. Thank you whoever put this on youtube

Fondest memory of all the Clancy brothers and Tommy Makem was on a Sunday night at a local Irish dance hall in Richmond, Melbourne, circa 1964. Nearing the end of the evenings dance and music, the Clancy's and Tommy entered the hall, unannounced, having come from their concert earlier in the Melbourne Town Hall, running up to the stage they concluded the evening with renditions of their most popular songs. What a finale that proved to be. Sure it was the talk of Melbourne town.May all the Clancy Brothers And Tommy Makem R.I.P. Thank you for your music.

magic performance by Clancy Heard my grandfather play that on the fiddle 50 years ago ....he called it Todhunters Lament

Ah nobody can sing it like Liam.What a man what a song.

Beautiful thank you

This song will always remind me of my father, I remember him sitting alone in his attic room listening to Liam Clancy records and playing this song over . May God be good to them both.

most beautiful song sang by a wonderful man with a warm and enchanting voice

For many years before Covid I played this in tears on my whistle, knowing that Covid was coming.

I listen to this song, and my heart is open.

There I covered him with fern and I piled on him a cairn, like an Irish king he sleeps in Aghadoe. ( a cairn is a gathering of stones, used a marker, in this case a grave). So beautiful. Thank you for posting.x

Still wonderful to listen to all these years later, magical a true legend

What a great song, by probably one of our greatest - ever. Liam Clancy absolute legend.

Just Beautiful.

God bless ya Liam, my goodness that's just beautiful! R.I.P.

Would stand in snow listening to him. Rest in peace Liam. Miss you.

Liam Clancy at his best. Thanks Liam and John Todhunter.

This song takes you to a place that you can’t normally travel to.

Just class.

Has there ever been a more beautiful recording of a more beautiful song

This song just melts my heart,thank you liam,may God bless you

Großartig! Danke.

What an amazing piece of music!

My humble words of appreciation matter naught in the grand scheme.Hearing deeply the words and the voice that expresses that deepness I am enthralled in the history of British rule over freedom desiring people for no other reason that this was their land by rights.We are all caught up in present events about to turn this world again tipsy turvy.This man implores songwriters to take heed and make known the peril of the free world against Isis and their ilk.Peter behind my

I have never heard Liam sing this before.Incredibly beautiful

Amazingly was never familiar with this until heard it on Late Date Recently.What a beautiful haunting song.Really tugs the heartstrings. Nicholas Parker

As Bob Dylan said, the greatest ballad singer 0f all

The name of John Todhunter, poet and composer, is all but forgotten in Ireland today, nearly a century after his death. But thanks to Liam Clancy, at least one of his songs lives on. If you don’t know Clancy’s version of Aghadoe, look it up on KZfaq. It demonstrates why Bob Dylan considered him the greatest of all ballad singers. The combined effect of his voice and Todhunter’s words is such that, unless you’ve had the back of your neck shaved recently, it’ll make the hairs stand on it. I don’t know if the event described in the lyric was based on any real-life story. It’s a 1798 ballad, narrated by a bereaved female, about a rebel lover hidden, betrayed, and executed. But I suspect that the name Aghadoe, hypnotically repeated throughout, was chosen only for its mellifluence. And as sung by Clancy at least, it helps make the song almost a lullaby. His version is also, by the way, an example of the power of good editing. In Todhunter’s original, there’s a verse naming the traitor - the woman’s brother - and showering curses on him. And even the curses are poetic. But Clancy wisely omits them. Instead, in four elliptical verses, his song moves gently and elegiacally from love to loss, to what we would today call the grieving process. Thus, the prelude to the dead lover’s burial includes the lines: “I walked from Mallow town to Aghadoe, Aghadoe/I took his head from the gaol gate to Aghadoe...” Which might look like a grisly detail in cold print, but not in song. In Todhunter’s words, as mediated by Clancy, the bringing home of the severed head is an act of tenderness. The song’s lullaby quality somehow survives it intact. Mind you, I only chanced on Clancy’s recording a few months ago, not long after seeing a desperately sad but beautiful film called Ida. This had nothing to do with Aghadoe, nor with Ireland. In fact, it may have had the least promising scenario of any film I’ve ever attended - being about the spiritual struggles a young nun in postwar communist Poland, shot in black and white. But it was a masterpiece nonetheless. And in case any of you still plan to catch up with it somewhere, I won’t say anything here other than this. There’s a scene in it reminiscent of the last verse of Aghadoe - if it doesn’t make you cry, you’re already dead. Getting back to Liam Clancy, I’m not alone in admiring his treatment of the song. Among the many posthumous tributes paid him back in 2010 was a recollection by his nephew, Robbie O’Connell, of a recording session they had done together in Kildare some years before. The various performers, including the Irish Philharmonic Orchestra, were working on a collection of 1798 songs, to mark the bicentenary, and took a break for lunch. And as they were eating sandwiches, reading newspapers, etc, Clancy sang Aghadoe, to electrifying effect. “When he finished,” recalled O’Connell, “there was just stunned silence for about 10 seconds. Then all the musicians, they all stood up, and gave him a standing ovation . . . it would give you goosebumps. I had never seen anything like it.” Todhunter must have written the ballad when under the influence of the Gaelic literary revival, to which he was an early recruit. Early for the movement, that is, not for him. Born to a Dublin Quaker family in 1839, he was a contemporary of WB Yeats’s father, rather than of the poet. But in the 1890s, when they were both in London, Yeats jnr converted him to the cause of writing Irish literature in English. Unfortunately, as the younger poet saw it, the conversion wasn’t permanent. Todhunter continued to have a weakness for Ibsenite drama, in which he did not flourish. His 1893 tragedy, A Black Cat, was performed for one night only. A follow-up called A Comedy of Sighs played to a chorus of jeers. WB recalled the author sitting in the theatre stoically, throughout all four acts, “listening to the howling of his enemies, while his friends slipped out one by one”. Had Todhunter been committed to any cause strongly enough, Yeats believed, he might have become famous. He had, for example, on “some casual patriotic impulse” (Yeats’s words) written “certain excellent verses now in all Irish anthologies”. But his flaw was that he never persisted with any one thing. He was considered a literary failure by the turn of the new century, and lived his later years out of the public eye before dying, with somewhat ironic timing, in 1916. www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/rebel-balladeer-without-a-cause-an-irishman-s-diary-about-john-todhunter-1.2094459 @FrankmcnallyIT(Irish Times 2015-02- 07)

I'm thinking I heard Liam sing that more than thirty years ago. Still resonates in my heart.

Liam voice always affected me no matter which song he sang. But when I hear him sing now I find myself grief-stricken since. He was a wonderful performer Greatly missed RIP

Such a beaitiful song sung with the voice everyman wish he could copy ☘️

This song is the most beautiful out of all complete music history❤

Beautiful, sensitive song.

My great grandfather came to Timaru NZ in 1862 and when through hard work he bought his own farm he named it" Aghadoe"after we were told the valley where he was born

makes me want to finish the story I started 10 years ago about someone I knew in Ireland

Very touching. Thanks for sharing.

Beautiful xx

Four dislikes of this beautiful song. Presumably people who have lost their hearing.

so beautiful

Love’s fair planet in the sky… 😍

beautiful.x

Joe Quilty Met him a couple o times, in Carrick, in Faugheen. A lovely man.

How deeply i miss him....

I hope calm heads find Aghadoe peacefully in the 21st century. A shared painful history will not be repeated.

What a amniocentesis voice - never to e forgotten

fantastic

This is pure talent at it's best.

I play this song every day Graham cutts

What a beautiful voice he had

This Man created Bob Dylan. Ireland's greatest Troubadour.

Fantastic wat can I say 🐶woof

I found this song through the Banshees of Inisherin, beautiful

I compare Liam to Frank SInatra in his ability to bring meaning to the songs he sings.

Love my Liam.♡♡♡♡♡♡

Music connects.

Up the Kingdom❤️

Sublime

Bet she never imagined that she'd be stopping off for a coffee on the way home from Mallow town

Níl a shárú le fáil. Go fíor álainn ar fad!!

one of the many unremembered me

I have been looking for the lyrics of this song Aghadoe, cannot find it, does anyone know?

Aghadoe doe doe Push pineapple grind coffee

So sad what the Brits done to Irish people and it stays with the people of Ireland to the present day! Give Ireland back to its people??

What a disappointment. I thought he was going to sing 'Agadoo'.

Black Lace did it better.