One of the finest musicians ever to play a traditional tune died on Wednesday, September 9th, at the age of 76, after an illness.
The uilleann piper Paddy Keenan was best known for his groundbreaking musicianship with The Bothy Band. His visceral playing drew deeply on the heritage woven into his DNA.
He was born on January 30th, 1950, in Trim, Co Meath. The family later moved to Ballyfermot, in west Dublin, where he grew up alongside the Furey brothers and Davy Spillane, who were equally steeped in the tradition.
His father and grandfather were renowned uilleann pipers, and Keenan fully embraced his inheritance. He had only been piping for four years when he made his stage debut, at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, at the age of 14. Even then there was no denying his nascent genius.
Keenan’s late brother Johnny, an accomplished banjo player, was a big influence.
Keenan’s first professional outing was with a band formed with his family called The Pavees, who toured extensively in Britain.
His exceptional solo albums, particularly his self-titled 1975 release, revealed a musician with a singular talent for delicately bending notes and revealing the internal forces of a tune so listeners could hear them anew.
Keenan’s playing elevated the pipes to new heights when he was a founding member of The Bothy Band, in 1975. He riffed off his fellow band members, anchored by Dónal Lunny’s intricate arrangements.
The percussive force of Lunny’s bouzouki found further propulsion through Keenan’s pipes, both interwoven in the intricate patterns formed by Micheál Ó Domhnaill’s guitar, Kevin Burke’s fiddle, Matt Molloy’s flute and whistle, and Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill’s keyboards.
For many years Keenan lived in the United States, where he toured extensively. He enjoyed many fruitful collaborations, including through the duo he formed with the guitarist and singer Tommy O’Sullivan.
After Keenan returned to live in Ireland in 2010, he made no secret of his struggle to settle back into life in the post-Celtic Tiger era. He scorned the lack of State support for traditional musicians who shared the best of what it is to be Irish: steeped in a rich cultural heritage while warmly embracing countless opportunities to collaborate with musicians from other genres.
Tasmania, Borneo, Russia, Timbuktu, Vietnam and Japan were all in a season’s itinerary for Keenan. With Liam Ó Maonlaí he travelled to the Festival in the Desert in Mali; a documentary film, Dambé: The Mali Project, was released in 2008 to mark this rich cultural exchange.
There was a particular exoticism to the way Keenan carried himself. His flowing hair, moustache and hat brought to mind a Carradine brother in The Long Riders, the Walter Hill film from 1980 about the Jesse James gang.
Ever supportive of young pipers, Keenan taught across the globe; he was buoyed by the emergence of female pipers. In 2011 he told The Irish Times that “a lot of young male pipers are very much into the technical, speed and competition side of playing. They’re into a wilder, crazy kind of playing. You won’t find that among female players, and it makes for more individual playing. It’s warmer, and there’s more mood being expressed.”
The reunion of The Bothy Band in 2024 for a seminal concert in Dublin, recorded by TG4, was a timely reminder of Keenan’s peerless musicianship, as well as an extraordinary tour de force from six musicians who recaptured the magic of their live performances from the 1970s.
On that occasion Paddy Glackin joined the original Bothy Band line-up. It was a remarkable reunion of a cadre of musicians who collectively and individually had taken traditional music by the scruff of the neck and introduced it to a whole new audience.
The Bothy Band: Traditional music’s most influential group blaze back after four decades
Notwithstanding the now jaded line that Keenan was the Jimi Hendrix of the pipes – he was so much more than that – a clear line can be traced from The Bothy Band to the many musicians who continue to play with such verve today.
Paddy Keenan had a wry world view, and was sanguine about the state of recorded music, as he told The Irish Times. “Irish music has always fluctuated, but it will never die,” he said. “There are kids playing music today who are being moulded, whether they sing or play well or not. Some of the albums should be called The Good, the Bad and Pro Tools.
“But the music itself is thriving, and there are amazing players here now. Sometimes it’s just a case of allowing musicians time to mature, so that they can use all of their technique to create a mood, and that’s what makes for individuality.”