Ronnie Drew, RIP

The Foggy Dew should be busy tonight. Mind you, so should all the other pubs in Dublin. There’ll be more cause than usual for singing now that one hears the sad news of Ronnie Drew’s death. The Telegraph obituary puts the appeal of The Dubliners quite well:

The Dubliners achieved fame and notoriety as singers of street ballads and bawdy songs, and as players of fine instrumental traditional music. Their emergence coincided with the British folk revival of the early 1960s, and they were one of the first folk bands to break into the pop charts.

In Ireland their closest rivals were the Clancy Brothers. The American roots music magazine Dirty Linen described the difference between the two groups as follows: “Whereas the Clancys were well-scrubbed returned Yanks from rural Tipperary, decked out in matching white Arran sweaters, the Dubliners were hard-drinking backstreet Dublin scrappers with unkempt hair and bushy beards, whose gigs seemed to happen by accident between fist fights.”