Andrew Curry writes: Luke Kelly of The Dubliners was born 85 years ago this week, although it’s also more than 40 years since his death. He is the man who gave The Dubliners their name, after Ronnie Drew decided they should no longer be called the Ronnie Drew Ballad Band. Kelly had been reading James Joyce’s short stories at the time.
Luke Kelly in 1967. Photo: The Dubliners website via Wikipedia.
In some ways, he came to be the spirit of The Dubliners for the next 20 years, even if he did take a break from the band for a couple of years.
He was a bridge between an earlier Ireland and the one that we know now, that has at last escaped the grasp of the grim alliance between Catholic Church and irish State. He left school at 13, migrated to England at 17, and did the dirty work that migrants always do, across the Midlands and the north of England —“cleaning lavatories, cleaning windows, cleaning railways”, he said later, as well as working on building sites.
But he also came in contact with the burgeoning British folk music boom, was playing the five-string banjo, and was encouraged to go to night school by the Irish communists Sean and Mollie Mulready, who had taken him under their wing. They had effectively been exiled from Ireland because of their politics. His two year break from The Dubliners in the mid-60s saw him back in England, working with Ewan MacColl.
It took me a while to appreciate The Dubliners. When I was younger, trying to understand Irish music from England, I thought the Chieftains a more authentic version of it, with their deeper roots in the tradition. What did I know? The Dubliners never duetted with Sting or Mick Jagger.
But as I’ve got older, I’ve come to appreciate them more, and in particular their mix of traditional Irish songs, many of which had come through the Irish traveller community, and the more political songs in their repertoire, both of Ireland’s colonised history and the radical songs learned from MacColl. But I also didn’t really start listening to them until after Kelly’s death.
In the Salut! Folk back catalogue, we have an article about Luke Kelly’s version (playing with the Dubliners) of Phil Coulter’s fine song about Derry, The Town I Loved So Well.
Coming late to The Dubliners, I missed Luke Kelly’s outstanding singing voice, which some think is the finest in Irish folk music, and the edge he brings to his performances, especially in the 1960s and early ‘70s. Chris Kavanagh has a touring show about Kelly, The Legend of Luke Kelly, which I saw last year.
It projects scores of photographs of the man onto the back of the stage, and you get a strong sense of his charismatic presence—the camera seems to settle on him—and also of the hard-drinking lifestyle that led to serious problems with alcohol, although it was a brain tumour that killed him.
You can see the qualities that led the poet Patrick Kavanagh to approach him in an Irish pub and ask him to put Raglan Road to music. There’s more on that in this RTE video.
Perhaps Luke Kelly was always going to die young. But I think he’s cherished because his contribution to The Dubliners managed to combine pride in their musical culture and history, and anger at the dead hand of the Catholic Church and Irish State that had kept Ireland in aspic for 40 years. While their audiences also had a great time, of course.
Luke Kelly’s final televised appearance with The Dubliners, already quite ill. The words seem appropriate.
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The featured image is of the statue of Luke Kelly’s head at Sherriff Street, Dublin. Photo by UtDicitur, via Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.
An earlier version of this piece appeared on the Salut! Folk Facebook group. Do visit it at https://www.facebook.com/groups/2902595146676633.
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