CULTURE SHOCKRonnie Drew's fate was to be the great hairy bowsie of Irish culture, to embody the disrespectable, feckless freedom that was for so long the only kind we had, writes Fintan O'Toole
THE LAST TIME I spoke to Ronnie Drew, he told me that what bothered him most about his cancer was looking in the mirror first thing in the morning. The hairless face looking back was a real terror. "Do you know who I see?" And with all the studied nonchalance of that great rumbling Dublin drawl, he drew out the answer: "Nos . . . fer . . . aaa . . . toooo!"
The vignette contained so much of his unique persona: the erudite reference to FW Murnau's expressionist vampire film; the deadpan Dublin humour that revels in the comic potential of misery; the proud, unrelenting refusal of sentimentality. He really did look like Nosferatu - a shorn, undead version of himself. By saying it himself, he was at once playing up the gruff, hard-chaw persona and displaying underneath it an extraordinary natural courtesy. It was a good-mannered and witty way of sparing everyone else the awkward task of telling him lies about how well he was looking.
By the time he was lying in state in his open coffin in the back room of his house in Greystones on Monday night, a small miracle had occurred. In his last weeks, his hair had returned - luxuriant and almost curly on top; flowing like an Old Testament prophet around his mouth and chin and down in a stately line onto his chest. The beard was back, and with it the Dubliner. It was as if Death himself, a little intimated perhaps, had reckoned against the wisdom of messing with Ronnie Drew's afterlife. The last image of him should be the familiar one of the wild balladeer. It wasn't all there was to him, and it was a role he tried hard to shrug off. But his fate was to be the great hairy bowsie of Irish culture, to embody the disrespectable, feckless freedom that was for so long the only kind we had.
He knew this himself. At one stage, late in his life, when he had become a kind of brand, a shortcut to authentic Dublinness, whatever that was supposed to be, he was doing a voiceover for an ad. The producer interrupted at one stage and said "Ronnie, could you try to sound a bit more like . . . um . . ."
"Like Ronnie Drew, you mean?", said Ronnie. He had the self-awareness to know that sounding like Ronnie Drew was what he did for a living. The amazing thing was that that sound was so utterly distinctive, so much a force of nature, that it didn't really matter how it was sold or packaged. Even when he was being used to supply a sheen of authenticity, he was still ineffably authentic. Even if he was selling you something, the voice, and the attitude within it, told you that he really didn't give a damn whether you bought it or not.
In Tower of Song, Leonard Cohen has those wonderfully sardonic, self-deprecating lines: "I was born like this, I had no choice/ I was born with the gift of a golden voice." The joke, of course, is that he sings this in his monotonous, mournful drone. Ronnie Drew didn't have a golden voice either, and neither did have a choice. His singing was no thing of beauty. When he was with The Dubliners, his double act with Luke Kelly, whose voice really was golden, could almost have been designed to make listeners wonder whether this Drew fellow was a singer at all. But Drew belonged with Cohen and Bob Dylan and Neil Young in that select company of great singers who don't have great voices. Stuck with that strange, guttural, underground sound, like a fierce beast growling to itself in some distant forest, he had no choice but to be unique. He had to make his own noise and command people to listen to it.
When Ronnie Drew became a national figure with The Dubliners in the mid-1960s, we weren't particularly drawn to unique voices. The hunger was for smoothness, for cosmopolitanism, for a version of America. The Clancy Brothers made a huge breakthrough for Irish folk music, but it was the sweetness, the essential gentility of rural Tipperary and of Tommy Makem's Keady that carried them through. Strange, angular Irish voices frightened us. When the great Connemara singer Joe Heaney, a consummate artist, was staying with Liam Clancy in Dublin in the mid-1960s and was asked to open a folk concert at the Grafton cinema, he was, as Peggy Seeger recalled, "booed off by this despicable crowd after the first two lines of his first song". The hard thing for traditional Irish musicians and singers wasn't just making themselves palatable to an international audience. It was making themselves palatable in Ireland.
Ronnie Drew was an unpalatable singer. He was a hairy creature from the depths of every mother's nightmare. His mother-in-law, whose beautiful and refined daughter he stole away from middle-class respectability, referred to him, not by name, but simply as "the minstrel". And she was right. He was nothing but a classless, free-floating troubadour, with a guitar, a beard, a voice from the bowels of the earth and an insolent attitude. Unlike the Clancys or Tommy Makem or Joe Heaney, he couldn't even claim to be a bearer of tradition who learned old songs at his mother's knee. The only sense in which he wasn't a minstrel was that minstrels were entertainers who set out to please. Ronnie gave the impression that the only person he wanted to please was himself.
Because he became "Ronnie Drew", a seemingly permanent landmark on the cultural landscape, it is easy to miss the sheer improbability of his achievement, not just of popularity, but of the status of a national treasure. The chemistry of The Dubliners was a huge part of it, of course, but Drew himself was the centre of that great group - he explains them as much as they explain him. What happened, and what made Ronnie Drew important, was that he found a way to be distinctive and authentic without being sentimental or romantic. He embodied a rootedness that was not at all about the past and all about a presence.
That presence was rough, raw and rebellious. But it was also - and this is what was missed by the dozens of Drew wannabes - immensely sophisticated. In Ronnie Drew, September Song, Sinead O'Brien's superb recent documentary on him, seen on RTÉ's Arts Lives series, Drew said that he thought that he and The Dubliners had not done anything great but that he hoped they had been good. He was sufficiently well-read and intelligent to know that great is a word that belongs to the likes of James Joyce and Patrick Kavanagh. But instead of concluding that everything else could be rubbish, he truly valued the second order of cultural values - the ordinary, the commonplace, the songs and stories that most of us inhabit most of the time. He knew they could be truly good and he made them so.
If you listen to Ronnie Drew sing a song, you will notice that, for all the thick, rumbling echoes of his voice, his diction is crystal-clear. Every word is respected and cherished. He simply loved the language and he used it to tell stories. He knew that, when we hear stories well told, we listen because we want to know what happens next. He also knew that that is what ballads really are - narratives told in song. His gift was, simply and honestly, in the way he told them.