The huge international popularity of Irish music is a relatively new phenomenon. For most of this century, Irish music and songs didn't have a broad appeal even at home, except among certain small groups.
Such people, in different parts of Ireland, kept the regional musical tradition alive, usually through the age-old method of handing down both songs and music orally. Among these were the Keanes of Caherlistrane in east Galway, whose enormous collection of music and song first brought them to national attention in the 1950s when the family of four brothers and four sisters established the Keane Ceili Band.
And, among collectors of Irish songs, the names of sisters Rita and Sarah Keane have especial significance. Songs such as Stor Mo Chroi, Once I Loved and May Morning Dew gained new audiences - and new singers - through these women's joint renditions of them both on albums and at live sessions.
Much of their material was also recorded and broadcast by RTE's Ciaran Mac Mathuna, who was a regular visitor to the Keane home during the 1950s and 1960s, collecting tunes and songs from the whole family. Much later, in the 1990s, the sisters featured with their niece, the singer Dolores Keane, on the enormously successful Bringing It All Back Home television series. (Among the guests to their house on that occasion was Elvis Costello, whom Sarah sent into the kitchen to make tea while the recording was going on.)
This month, in Galway, the contribution of Rita and Sarah Keane to Irish music and song is being acknowledged by fellow musicians at a special award ceremony, which takes place as part of Galway's first Fonn Summer School of Irish Music and Culture. The ceremony will be followed by a celebration concert featuring, among others, Dolores and her brother Sean Keane, also one of the country's most popular singers.
Sitting in their beautifully kept, old-fashioned farmhouse outside Caherlistrane, the sisters say they cannot remember when they first began to play music and to learn songs. Their father was a musician, their mother a singer who also played concertina and melodeon, but who never performed in public - women didn't in those days.
They remember most of what she sang as being sad. She passed on an enormous collection of songs to her daughters, although both Rita and Sarah say that many were lost, simply because they never learned them. Others were incomplete - for instance, they know that their mother had three verses more than they know of Once I Loved.
"We just sat down and started singing", says Sarah, recalling how their public career began. "My late sister Mary used to do it with me first."
Today, Dolores and Sean Keane still sing many of the songs which they, in turn, learned from Rita and Sarah, and also from their mother, Bridie, a championship singer, whose brother Pat also played music and made his own fiddle.
For the younger generation, those old songs are part of a repertoire which also contains contemporary folk and popular music. Nonetheless, material such as Stor Mo Chroi, May Morning Dew and The Moorlough Shore continue to crop up in their albums and concerts, an indication of the younger Keanes' loyalty to their roots and their traditional background.
THE Keanes farmed 80 acres at Caherlistrane, as well as travelling the length and breadth of the country with their ceili band. As Rita and Sarah describe it, their youth was full of fun and excitement. They went out to play music with the band - Rita on accordion and Sarah on fiddle - and to enjoy themselves. Today their sense of fun and warmth remains undiminished.
Their first big concert, they recall, was in Tuam around 1957 where they played to over 1,000 people. They later travelled further afield, developing a routine where they'd leave home in the evening after finishing the farm work and return, after concerts, in the early hours of the morning to be ready for another day's work. "We didn't need much sleep then," says Sarah.
In those days, performers often swapped songs and some of the songs with which the sisters became most associated, such as The Moorlough Shore and The Shores of Lough Bran, were learned from other singers such as Len Graham and Cathal McConnell - with their permission, of course. These people were frequent visitors to the Keane home, where singing, music and set dancing would go on until all hours of the morning.
The lives of both the older and younger generation of the family have always revolved around music. But while Sean and Dolores have travelled the world entertaining audiences at concerts and folk festivals, Rita and Sarah belonged to an era where this didn't happen. They played in England several times, but their first appearance at an international folk festival was three years ago in Scandinavia with Sean and Dolores. That was the first time they needed passports. But since then, they've got the travel bug and have visited the US several times with Dolores.
Dolores's and Sean's family home was just across the field from Rita and Sarah's house and Dolores spent most of her youth with them, their parents and brothers and sisters. She remembers those as blissfully happy days farming and playing.
Ciaran Mac Mathuna would arrive with the RTE recording van and there would be "masses of people" around for the sessions, she says. Unusually, for that time, the sisters had a car, and so there was lots of travelling.
Growing up, Sean and Dolores sang together in the family ceili band. Later they also worked together in a band called Reel Union, which also included Mairtin O Connor and John Faulkner. Then they followed somewhat similar but separate musical routes.
As well as her work with De Dannan, Dolores later sang on the phenomenally successful A Woman's Heart album and tour, and recorded with singers such as Emmylou Harris, Nanci Griffith and John Prine. She has also released a string of successful solo albums, including Dolores Keane, There Was a Maid (with John Faulkner), Lion in a Cage and The Best of Dolores Keane.
Sean was a member of Arcady (which also included Sharon Shannon), before deciding to go solo in the early 1990s. Since then, he has concentrated on building his own reputation - with his most recent album, No Stranger (released last year) going platinum in Ireland. Like Dolores, he opts for songs which he feels suit his voice, although they can be as modern as Sting's Fields of Gold.
The two rarely perform together these days, but last Christmas they embarked on an enormously successful joint tour of Ireland. They repeated the show recently at the Cambridge Folk Festival and will tour Britain in September.
The Fonn Hall of Fame Award will be presented to Rita and Sarah as part of Galway's first traditional music school. For the school's director, Mick Crehan, it's a recognition of the work done by the sisters in keeping Irish music alive.
"Irish music is so vibrant now that we tend to forget that it nearly died out in the 1930s and 1940s, and it was people like Rita and Sarah who kept it going. This is simply in recognition of that and we are very much indebted to them."
The Fonn Hall of Fame Award will be presented to Rita and Sarah Keane on August 19th, in Galway, followed by a celebration concert featuring, among others, Dolores and Sean Keane. Fonn runs from August 15th to 22nd in Galway. Classes and concerts will be held throughout the week. For details, phone 091-562099.