Tom Lenihan

Tom Lenihan was a well known Irish traditional singer from Milltown Malbay, County Clare, Ireland. Tom and Margaret Lenihan lived in a farmhouse in Knockbrack, a few miles outside Miltown Malbay. He was a farmer and the local butcher. According to the sleevenotes of the CD Around the Hills of Clare: Tom had a very large repertoire and positive ideas about singing. He insisted that the story was most important aspect; the singer's involvement with the song was paramount. To him it was vital that the singer used speech pat-terns, made sense of the words, singing them as close as possible to the way one would speak; to fit the tune to the words, not to make the words fit the tune. One can appreciate why Tom had so many narrative songs in his repertoire; his attitude to singing is illustrated on the two tracks of speech. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Len...) under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...)