First published on The Journal of Music in Ireland on 18 March 2026.

I wasn’t there at the Gradam Ceoil TG4 awards that Easter Sunday evening at the National Concert Hall in 2022, when Dolores Keane sang ‘Caledonia’, but I watched it on television. I remember standing in my sitting room as she took the song at a slightly slower pace, standing at a podium with her Gradam Saoil award beside her. Dougie MacLean’s ‘Caledonia’ was a song she had sung thousands of times since she recorded it in 1988, but this felt different. There was a freedom and intimacy to the performance, like she was telling a story to friends. She looked at the crowd, pausing over lines like ‘I proved the points that I needed proving’, lifting out her arm to them when she sang ‘I think about you all the time’, keeping her eyes closed for just a little bit longer when she sang the line about losing friends and finding new ones. I don’t know if I was reading too much into her singing that night, but it was a performance I never forgot.

A few years earlier, I had seen her sing for the first time in many years, at a Frankie Gavin concert in the Town Hall Theatre in Galway. They were friends since they were teenagers, and the fiddle player invited her on stage. Keane had had her struggles in life, but this evening felt like a return. She seemed apprehensive before she began ‘Galway Bay’, and relieved afterwards, but it was a beautiful performance and she had the whole room with her.

When I listen now to the very first De Dannan album from 1975, I can hear why the version of ‘The Rambling Irishman’ was so popular and brought her to national attention. The arrangement gave space to her powerful voice, and, in that simple rising and falling melody, we hear the depth that made her distinctive. But ‘The Rambling Irishman’ is different to her other tracks on the album. On ‘The Mountain Streams Where the Moorcocks Crow’, we hear her sing in a style that is closer to the sean-nós tradition – highly ornamented, restrained, entirely solo, and a melody that is deceptively simple, showing her command of the art. 

Her aunts Sarah and Rita Keane, who raised her in a musical home from a very young age, said she could ‘hum a reel’ by the age of three, and by eleven years old, she had picked up much of their repertoire, and clearly absorbed the sean-nós tradition too. We hear it on her solo album There Was a Maid from 1978, when she sings ‘There Was a Maid in Her Father’s Garden’. She has said that singing with her aunts – three voices in unison – was ‘totally relaxed’ and ‘a different thing’. In this record, she brings that sense of repose to her own solo singing, drawing us into the story. When she sings in Irish on the same album, on ‘Tá Mo Chleamhnas Déanta’, the sean-nós roots are even more evident. 

It was this combination of an expressive, distinctive voice, steeped in Irish tradition to the extent that she could add subtle turns to any melody, that caught the ear of many and made her a household name. Her subsequent collaborations with John Faulkner produced more classic recordings such as Broken Hearted I’ll Wander and Sail Óg Rua. As he writes in his 2024 memoir Storm in My Heart, after their marriage ended, he would still produce her albums and suggest songs to her (such as ‘Caledonia’ and ‘Never Be the Sun’, and also ‘Lion in a Cage’, which he wrote about Nelson Mandela and which gave Keane an Irish chart hit).

Keane was also a fine flute and whistle player. I played with her once, when she joined in a session at the Harcourt Hotel in Dublin. She was fun, full of chat and determined to get back to playing the flute more. For the twentieth anniversary of De Dannan in 1995, the members came together for a celebratory concert at the Galway Arts Festival. I can still remember watching Keane between songs, seeing her total joy in listening to the tunes by Frankie Gavin, Alec Finn and her old bandmates. Her inclusion on the A Woman’s Heart compilation and subsequent tours brought her to an even wider audience.

When a voice that has been part of Irish music for five decades leaves us, it is difficult not to think about what it meant. Everyone recognised the singing of Dolores Keane the moment they heard her. President Catherine Connolly spoke about the honesty in her singing, ‘what it means to bring the full weight of yourself to a song.’ 

Her full-hearted approach seemed to represent something deep in Irish culture: how we value the intrinsic power of the singer and the song. In the opening lines of ‘Caledonia’, the narrator talks about ‘singing songs that make me think about where I come from’. That is what Dolores Keane always made us do.