Irish singer Mary Coughlan woke up in New Zealand last week to learn of the death of her fellow Galwegian Dolores Keane and paid tribute to the beauty of her voice. Coughlan moves next to Australia as part of her current tour, before returning for a gig in Galway, continuing to deliver sets imbued with the soulfulness, lyricism, resilience, pain and power that also marked the career of Keane.

The extent of the distances they and their voices have travelled is striking. A photograph in the Irish Traditional Music Archive in Dublin sees Keane in 1978 at the Newfoundland folk festival. For Nuala O’Connor’s RTÉ/BBC Bringing it All Back Home series (1991), Keane performed in Nashville with Mary Black and Emmylou Harris. These were voyages far from the thatched cottage in Carragh, Caherlistrane in Galway, home of her aunts Rita and Sarah Keane and a hive of traditional Irish musical endeavour where their mother May was a noted collector. The Keane family céilí band stormed the dance halls in Galway and beyond in the 1940s and 1950s.

Rita and Sarah did much to promote the sean-nós tradition, while also helping to rear the family of their brother Matt, including his daughter Dolores as she absorbed the influences and found her voice. She recalled that even at the age of four or five the “noble........

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