Sir, – Reading Barry McCrea’s article prompted me to write, as his reflections on Dolores Keane echo my own memories of Ireland in the 1980s (“Dolores Keane will forever be the sound of the second time continuity and change coincided in Ireland,” March 20th).
I remember when our family of six crowded into a blue VW Jetta for long drives to my parents’ homeplaces in Roscommon and Longford. Most trips were for family events – memorial masses, visiting relatives or tending graves.
Dad played cassette tapes: James Last, Roy Orbison, Don McLean, and Dolores Keane. Each artist had their turn. However, when the roads narrowed into winding country roads, it was Dolores’s voice that always seemed most fitting.
As we passed bursts of green hedges and fields, waved at men on tractors and women chatting at gates, and inched over narrow bridges, the countryside would open around us – sometimes the rain hitting the windows or being blinded by the evening sun.
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Like McCrea, I found that her singing shaped not just those memories, but also a sense of place and belonging that remains with me years later.
As we got older, we sometimes tried to change the music, passing up different cassettes from the back seat, but Dad, at the tape deck, rarely let another artist play for long. Looking back, I’m glad he didn’t.
Back then, Dolores Keane’s singing became the soundtrack of those journeys, connecting our parents’ pasts to our present in the 1980s and our everyday family life.
Even now, when I hear her voice, I’m transported back to those days and the roads in the blue Jetta. It’s a lasting link to that time, that place, and the people and occasions we travelled for. – Yours, etc,
BARBARA CLANCY,
Stillorgan,
Dublin.
