As he prepares for a special Valentine’s Night show in Dublin, the singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist talks to Tom Gilmore about some of the songs that have made him so popular.

 

Singer Seán Keane has been singing love songs, and lots of other songs too, since the age of seven when he won a Comhaltas Co. Galway final for singing the old Irish ballad The May Morning Dew. It is still one of his most popular songs over fifty years later. But it has also taken the internationally renowned singer and multi-instrumentalist over half a century to conquer his subconscious fear about playing guitar following a fright he got on a fateful day, also at the age of seven when he won his second singing award. Most of his fans may not have known this phobia about playing a guitar that Seán had and neither do they know that he started off as a heavy metal man before becoming a trad/folk singing star!

The many love songs that Seán loves to sing are about various forms of love and not just about love involving just men and women. His songs are about love of one’s country or one’s old family home, love for a town or county or love for the old folks now sadly dead and gone as is the theme of The May Morning Dew.

Born into a family in Caherlistrane, Co. Galway that has been steeped in traditional music for generations, Seán has made his mark in the music world across many genres spanning trad, folk, country, orchestral and even occasionally the blues.

Like the generations before them, and most of the family’s current generation too, all Seán’s siblings could sing or play instruments, with his famous sister Dolores and brother Matt along with himself being best known as recording artists.

Seán is a multi-instrumentalist, playing the flute, tin whistle, uilleann pipes, harmonica, Jew’s harp and he says he can “rattle out an occasional tune on the harp and piano” too. But while some people have a phobia about flying, Seán had a phobia about playing guitar for over 50 years until recently. He will explain all that and about his time as a heavy metal man later in this interview.

With so much music around him at home, and his family’s Keane’s Ceili Band, as well as his aunts Sarah and Rita, featured regularly on the then Radio Éireann and RTÉ TV when Seán was growing up, it seemed that singing might be his destination too.

His late parents Matt Keane (Snr) and Bridie (nee Comer) were beautiful singers and naturally they influenced their youngest child to sing also from an early age.

“It all started one evening when as a child I came home from school in Sylane and my mother was reading a piece in The Tuam Herald. She he was reading out loud about the Fleadh Cheoil being in Tuam a few weeks later. As Dolores was a teenager then and singing regularly, our mother said to her to ‘take that young lad, (I was about seven) and teach him a song and we will put him into a competition and see if he can sing’.

“So I learned The May Morning Dew and the minute I heard my mother sing it to me it kinda’ opened up a vision of what the song was about and I became immersed in the story. It was my first connection with getting lost in the story of a song. Even though I was still young I could relate to its theme about the love of a family and about loss for them also while in a foreign land,” says Seán.

He added: “Even now over 50 years later I still sing it and still get the same buzz out of doing so. It still resonates with me about different situations and different people’s love for their homeland and often their sense of loss too for times and places they might never see again.”

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own