You gotta love Irish music when you hear legendary balladeer Tommy Makem and his three sons – Shane, Conor and Rory – play for three hours at a venue as cavernous as the Maine Center for the Arts, in Orono, where the family foursome performed Saturday. In fact, you really gotta love the music because not only is it limited in variety, but because it often includes penny whistles and singalongs. And you also have to love banter about O’Neill and Kelly and The Troubles and all the battles of Irish history.

But mostly, you have to see a grass-roots art form that rose out of small spaces such as pubs and family gatherings expanded and miked to a large concert hall. And overmiked at that – with alternating graphics of Celtic designs and bright green shamrocks projected on the back wall of the stage.

If you can get past all this, and – judging by the hoots and hollers by an enthusiastic crowd at the Maine Center – most people did, then the concert was a bonny dream come true. The Makem boys jockeyed in the first hour between folk tunes such as “The Rose of Allendale,” “The Irish Rover,” and “The Rattlin’ Bog” and corny jokes such as: Do you know what a dentist of the year gets? A plaque. Get it?

When Tommy Makem came on after intermission, he slipped easily into his own repertoire of gawky jokes about talking chickens, frogs and ducks. His brand of jibing is predictable and even mildly offensive, but he’s the real thing, and there’s no doubting his legendary place in the annals of the Irish music resurgence of the last 50 years.

After all, Makem learned his craft from his mother, a folk singer and song collector back in Keady, County Armagh, Ireland. That’s where he also hooked up with the Clancy Brothers and built a career touring the world, settling eventually in Dover, N.H., where he still lives.

Makem, who plays banjo and whistles, is known as a storyteller songster and divides his time equally between the two in concert. At the Maine Center, he was accompanied for nearly two hours by Rory Makem, a terrifically talented string player. But the stage was his as he crooned his way through “The Rambles of Spring,” “Bridie Murphy and the Kamikazi Pilot,” “The Winds Are Singing Freedom” and “Lord of the Dance.”

In honor of William Butler Yeats and A.E. Housman, Makem wove together an inspirational patchwork of “Down by the Sally Gardens” and “When I Was One and Twenty.” He also offered a few American standards: Pete Seeger’s “Rainbow Race” as well as “If I Had a Hammer” and “This Land Is Your Land,” both of which united sons and father in song. For some, the Makem sound may not compare to other family song groups, but there’s something to be said for their generational perseverance, ensemble sharpness and family camaraderie.

As an encore, Makem recited “Requiem for the Croppies,” Seamus Heaney’s account of the Irish rebellion in which fighters chopped off their hair in solidarity. They had little more than grain in their pockets when they were tragically killed and buried in a mass grave. The next spring, the burial field defiantly sprouted grain fiercely and thickly. The English torched it. The next year, the field grew even more richly. It was the perfect segue to Makem’s famed, patriotic tear-jerker “Four Green Fields.” He sang solo while the skillful Rory added guitar. Though Makem’s voice isn’t what it once must have been, to hear him sing this song is not only a historical pleasure but a musical honor, and the most sparkling moment of the evening.