Ronnie Drew helped establish the Dubliners as a founding member and performed as the ensemble’s lead singer and guitarist across two separate periods, first from 1962 until 1974 and again from 1979 through 1995. After stepping away to concentrate on individual projects, he continued to earn praise for his forceful style and gritty voice, once characterized as “the sound of coke being crushed under a door.”
Throughout his career Drew has partnered with numerous musicians. His 1995 solo release Dirty Rotten Shame included the duet “Drinkin’ in the Day” alongside Bono of U2, while he contributed vocals as a guest on Jah Wobble’s 1998 album The Celtic Poets. He joined De Danaan for their 1996 European tour, appeared with pianist Antonio Breschi in Italy during April 1997, and performed in Australia and New Zealand alongside Donal Lunny the following month. That same year he shared the stage with Niall Toibin in the stage production The Bells of Hell, and in 1998 he mounted the solo cabaret Ronnie, I Hardly Knew Ye. Many of his later concerts featured guitarist Mike Hanrahan as his regular collaborator.
Glasthule, a modest settlement roughly eight miles outside Dublin, is where Drew was born; he received his schooling in Dun Laghaire. At seventeen he departed the classroom and spent the next seven years moving through an array of positions—an electrical apprenticeship, work assisting in a drapery shop, sales of electrical goods and vacuum cleaners, kitchen porter duties, operation of a hotel lift, and service as a telephonist at the Dublin Telephone Exchange.
Early in the 1960s he traveled to Spain with colleagues from the telephone exchange who intended to teach English there; after a short stay he returned to Dublin and began meeting other vocalists and instrumentalists who gathered at O’Donoghue’s Pub. Exposure to the radio programs Ceolta Fire and Ballad Makers Saturday Night awakened his interest in Irish folk music, and by his early twenties he had become self-taught on guitar while assembling an expanding collection of songs. The musicians decided to combine their efforts and debuted in 1962 as the Ronnie Drew Folk Group, later adopting the name the Dubliners and achieving international recognition. Although Drew departed in 1975 to issue the solo recordings Ronnie Drew and Guaranteed, he rejoined the ensemble four years afterward and stayed until 1995. In 1998 he and his son Phelim appeared together in the BBC drama The Ambassador, and the next year he issued his fourth solo album, The Humour Is on Me.
