First published on The Journal of Music in Ireland on 27 October 2026.
The night before Dónal Lunny passed away, I was sitting at the piano, thinking about his music, and picking out the melody for ‘Tribute to Peadar O’Donnell’. Lunny composed the air and recorded it with Moving Hearts in 1985, and its wandering, cumulative power has always made me curious. But as I worked through it and added chords, I realised that much of the air stays within the bounds of the standard D, G and A major chords, with just a touch of B minor and C. So many melodies and songs have been written with these chords that I was left with one question: how did he find this melody in there?
In the RTÉ news report following his death on 23 October, there is a clip of Lunny saying that once he received a guitar as a teenager he spent all day ‘thinking about chords’. It was jazz initially, and then his first role was as the drummer in a Beatles and Shadows tribute group. But when he turned to Irish traditional music, he did not load it down with complicated chord progressions, modulations and inversions that could have passed quickly out of fashion. He seemed to go in exactly the opposite direction: he developed a way of accompanying Irish music that grew out of the genre itself.
Key to this was the instrument he spotted in Andy Irvine’s flat shortly after they first met. Irvine gifted him his Greek bouzouki and Lunny modified it immediately. As he told Paddy Glackin in an interview in 2021, unlike guitar, the bouzouki made it easier to play just the root and the fifth of chords: ‘The tune goes on,’ he said, ‘and the bouzouki lets it through.’
I recall an interview with him in which he talked about a turning point in his music, when he was in the studio with Planxty and struggling to figure out an accompaniment to a Liam O’Flynn tune. In the end, he painted himself into a corner and ended up just playing a drone – to his dissatisfaction. But he worked through this question creatively and decided that Irish music could be accompanied in a way that was sensitive to the genre, and his deeper journey had begun.
But there was much more than that to his creative process. He once said that ‘the music itself supplies all the information’ and that ‘if the inspiration comes from the original music, it’s more likely to succeed.’ Easy to say, difficult to do. Not everyone picks up the supplied information, like the importance of individual notes or the internal rhythm. Lunny was listening closer. On Paddy Glackin’s set of jigs on the Doublin’ album, he varies the bouzouki backing each time round, saving up a satisfying descending bass line for the final dénouement.
He could also hear new rhythmic possibilities in the supposedly limited palette of 4/4 reels and 6/8 jigs. Listen to the finale of the Dónal Lunny live album from 1987, where he shifts the band through different accents in the reels, or the opening jig which uses one of Lunny’s favourite devices: starting with a syncopated rhythm that makes it difficult to know when the instruments will enter.
The title of Nuala O’Connor’s 2007 documentary on his work, Follow the Music, reflected his ability to stay close to, and work organically with, Irish traditional music, but it also captured his restlessness: Lunny was always moving on. Planxty, Bothy Band, Moving Hearts, the Dónal Lunny Band, Coolfin, Mozaik, Atlantic Arc, Triad. As listeners, we have benefited from this inquisitiveness because it meant his talent was never restricted to one construct, but it also brought its own price. He said in the documentary that he sometimes moved on too quickly from projects, artistically and commercially.
I met him for the first time in the mid-1990s in Trinity College where I was playing a very small role in a performance. His famous flat-backed bouzouki was resting on a table as he stood beside it waiting to play. For want of a reason to start talking to him, I blurted out: ‘Is this the bouzouki you play on “Martin Wynne’s”?’ ‘Yes!’ he said, and he picked it up and started demonstrating the chords, happy to discuss the intricacies of the instrument and the recording.
By coincidence, the next time we met was in Wynn’s Hotel in Dublin in 2001 to talk about issues facing musicians and how my magazine could help. His experience in the music industry had made him a strong advocate for better conditions for artists and he was taking practical steps as a board member of IMRO. When he moved to Japan in 2002, I sent him every issue and he kindly responded with a letter that I could publish. In 2013, I finally got to play with him at the Cork Folk Festival. Sitting beside him on stage, I could hear his thoughtful playing up close. We were playing tunes that he must have heard a thousand times, but he was still subtly moving around them.
One of Lunny’s last performances was at the Seán Corcoran Series in Drogheda seven weeks ago, where he sang ‘Bean Pháidín’ and played ‘Sí Bheag Sí Mhór’, both from early Planxty. More than fifty years on, this time with Macdara Ó Faoláinon bouzouki, he was still exploring new ways of performing old repertoire. During the pandemic, he and Irvine recorded a concert at the White Horse in Ballincollig and they played ‘Tribute to Peadar O’Donnell’. I couldn’t help noticing that he had slipped in a new augmented chord in the second part. Still thinking, still exploring.
His life’s work seems to be an endless exploration of a singular challenge: how to find new possibilities within Irish traditional music and song. It is one thing to be on that journey; it is another to musically bind together successive groups of outstanding musicians along the way. Christy Moore said in his tribute to Lunny last year at the RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards that he was ‘always there and always willing’. That gift seems to have been as important as everything else.
