I have been trying to understand why, of all the music I listened to in my teens and early twenties, the voice of Dolores Keane continues to have such a long and mysterious resonance for me. The soundtrack of one’s youth is always evocative of more than just one’s past – it tastes forever of vigour and promise. But there is something more than that about Dolores Keane, as though her voice entered the groundwater of my being and circulates there still.
Her singing never sounds like the result of willed individual expression. It seems to come from somewhere beyond or prior to her, passing through her in order to reach us. She was one of those artists who feel as much a conductor as a generator of their music, one of those rare individuals whose talent can connect whole cultures to themselves.
Hers was a style trained, of course, in the traditional way, ar an sean-nós, and it seems to offer a direct point of access to the ancient past. But for me her singing also contains an equal measure of something new and future-facing, a glint of something unknown and exciting about to come.
It feels to me like the essence of the Irish late 20th century. Nowadays, Irish people are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as successful, beloved protagonists on a world stage. We take it for granted, too, that the Irish language and traditional music are things in which most of the nation takes pleasure and pride.
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It is easy to forget that, right up to the early 1990s, Ireland felt like a place doomed to mediocrity and failure, and Gaelic culture was considered the preserve of an eccentric minority. Some of the great success stories in the musical arena, such as U2 or Bob Geldof, using the propulsive force of their talent to escape the gravitational pull of the local culture (this dynamic – Dubliners learning to sing soul music – animates the plot of The Commitments, the text that for me most sums up the twilit feeling of the Irish 1980s). The success of the Irish soccer team in the 1990 World Cup was like a prank that ran on improbably long: Italia ’90 was a carnival fuelled by the giddy mortification of having an unexpected audience.
As the 1990s went on, a gradual, shy sense started to emerge in Ireland that there was something worthwhile in native culture, a sense that what had been taken for granted, considered unworthy of notice, might have a value after all. The slow thaw of the disdain that had frosted over indigenous music and language seemed connected to other great and promising changes afoot in the wider world – the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the apartheid regime, the prospect of a united Europe.
In Ireland, the economy was starting to bubble more confidently and the Catholic hold on questions of public morality was loosening. But the rediscovery of folk culture and its value seemed like a step forward, not a regression. The rediscovery of the value of old and traditional things was indistinguishable from the embrace of what was modern and new.
For me, Dolores Keane is the sound of that moment where change and continuity overlapped. The shape of her childhood in Caherlistrane was familiar to anyone who grew up or whose parents grew up in mid-20th-century rural Ireland: being reared, almost by accident, by childless relatives; learning songs from her aunts and from passing neighbours in the kitchen.
In this kitchen, Keane was formed as a singer in the most traditional style imaginable. When she and her aunts sing in Irish we hear in their local pronunciations not the sound of revivalist, school Irish, but the residues of the language that had passed out of everyday use in east Galway a half century before; in her slides and grace notes we hear the sound of generations of local singers.
Yet in the 1990s, this age-old sound took on the quality of something confident and modern. In Lion in a Cage this quality is brought out explicitly, in its miraculous mixture of bongos and bodhráns, uilleann pipes and synth. Running through this “world music” sound, its dominant strain that gives it structure and meaning, is the unmistakeable current of Caherlistrane. No matter what kind of lyrics Dolores utters – from Sail Óg Rua to Nelson Mandela or the burning skies of Lebanon – sean-nós ornamentation blooms upon them as naturally as flowers on hedgerows.
Gramsci’s line about historical transition – “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born” – does not really apply to the Irish 1990s. It would be more accurate to say that the old world was still alive and kicking, while a new world was already flourishing.
This synthesis of the old and the local with the modern and the global was a driver of immense cultural energy. It propelled the speech and concerns of Brian Friel’s Ballybeg to Broadway and the West End. The glamorous international reach of Seamus Heaney’s poetry gave the feeling of a natural bridge between the life of a small farm – the rhythms of which had shaped the childhood of so many Irish people – and that of a globalised, increasingly prosperous nation. His poems about the ancient bodies found preserved in the bog evoke this sense of two, apparently incompatible realities co-existing in the same place.
This magical phase, in which tradition and innovation were at one might be thought of as culminating in the middle of the decade, with Riverdance in 1994 and Heaney’s Nobel prize a year later. Its sound was partly deafened by the roar of the Celtic Tiger that came shortly afterwards.
A similar collision of tradition and innovation had characterised the Irish Revival at the beginning of the 20th century, when the avant-garde ideas of the European continent met the age‑old peasant civilisation and oral culture of Ireland to give us Yeats, Synge, and the Irish modernism that followed.
Most countries are lucky to experience a moment when continuity and change coincide, when past, present and future momentarily align. Ireland has experienced it twice, and for me Dolores Keane will forever be the sound of the second time.
Barry McCrea is Professor of Irish Studies and English at the University of Notre Dame
