Luke Kelly Tribute By Fintan O'Toole
 
Some voices have an awesome but distant beauty.
They come to us from some other worldly 
reface and even as they thrift and uplift us,
they remain somehow alien. The sound they make 
is not one we could imagine emerging from our own throats.
We value their strange power, 
her exotic charm: But some undertone within them whispers
of our own banal ordinariness. 
they tardatise us with a perfection we can never share,
Even as they express out wildest hopes 
and deepest despair, they remind us of our inarticulate selves.
Then again there are voices that are too familiar, too friendly
They make noises that we recognise.

We can feel at home in their comfortable banality.
But they quickly fade into boredom They have no strangeness,
no sense of aspiration. Even as we think 'I could do 
that we also wonder why were listening to sounds we
could hear any aid trine. There is nothing being added to our world,
no new space being opened up for the imagination to play in 
Very, very rarely: there is a voice that hovers with perfect grace
between these two states it is otherworldly but not alien.
it lifts us out of ourselves and takes us to places that we 
recognise, Its perfection doesn't tantalise or pander, it simply connects.
  
it is strange commanding, majestic. But is speaks to us of ourselves.
it is a sound we might make if we were better. It articulates
the feelings we can't express, gives an epic twist to the drama of 
ordinary lives. Luke Kelly s was one of those rare voices, and those
of us who heard it will never get it out of our heads. Luke embodied
something that runs through the culture of his native city a habit
of mind in which the ordinary is made heroic, it is there in  zozimus's 
great song The Funding of Moses, where the Biblical tale in which an
oppressed woman outwits a tyrant and gets to keep her child is
enacted on the streets of Dublin: 

 

It is in James Joyce s Ulysses, which replays Homer's Odyssey
 on theory streets with or advertising salesman as Odysseus
it's above all in lames Larkin's greet cry cf defionce to
the bosses during the 1413 Lockout in which the poor of Dublin,
strugglingo assert ?he dignity of their lives, became Jesus on
Calvary for I'll crucify Christ in this town no longer.' What made
Luke Kelly a folk singer was.not what he song (like most real
folk singers he never operated a musicalcheckpoint and demanded
that songs present their idenlhy papers), but the way he trnnslated
this attitude into sound. To listen to him was to be taken onto
a level where the feelings of rile common woman and man were
g!ven the dignity that throughout the history of art, has been granted
only to the heroes and aristocrats. He put flesh on that wonder
in phrase in Tom Murphy's The Gigli Concert: a play about the
desire we all love to speak of our deepest selves in music:
to sing -- a sound to clothe our emotion and aspiration.'

He dressed the emotions and sr pirotidns of his kind of people --
the working class in their Sunday best. This wasn't about pondering.
Though he was immensely popular, his popularty rested on the hord
ground of respect. His style of performancewas the very opposite of
ingratiation. His approach so his audience was simple, ever, stern
And this is why his appeal has lasted long after his depth.
Performers who abase themselves before the audience and beg for its
love often get a short-term return of ersatz of affection
Luke's irnmense dignity forged a much deeper bond. He treated his
audiences as people who deserved the respect on artist brings to a
demanding medium and those who did deserve it will alwava love hirn for it