“After a while, people started drifting in and soon I was singing Irish ballads for Ms. Sinatra, Robert Stack, Robert Mitchum,
Henry Mancini, James Coburn and God knows who else. They loved Finnegan's Wake, and as I sat there teaching them the chorus,
I suddenly thought, 'what the hell am I doing here, I'm Danny Doyle, a coal-man's son from the back lanes of Dublin.' All I
could do was laugh." - Danny Doyle
One of the greatest Irish ballad singers to ever play an Irish festival, a concert hall or
a palace, Danny Doyle has captured audiences throughout the world with his songs and stories, stories often told to him by his mother
and his great-grandmother, or learned in the back room of some distant pub. His great-grandmother’s bright memories of the strike
and lock-out in Dublin 1913, the violent drama of the 1916 Easter Rising and the following War of Independence, 1918-1922, fascinated
the young Dublin man who soaked up the tales that now make up much of his stage presentation.
Kathleen Fitzgerald Doyle and
Frank Doyle, Danny’s parents, were Dublin born but with rural ancestry. Danny, born in Dublin in 1940, is one of three boys
and five girls. They lived in a damp two room basement flat on Herbert Place, by the banks of the Grand Canal near Baggot Street
Bridge. “A somewhat Bohemian area,” Danny says,” of whom someone wrote ‘no small area of any city anywhere has been trod by
so much genius.’ Something of an exaggeration perhaps, but still, there is a great deal of truth in it.”
Renowned literary
personalities and neighbors Brendan Behan (1923 – 1964) and Patrick Kavanagh (1904 – 1967), who heard the young Doyle singing in the
church choir in St. Mary’s, Haddington Road, Dublin, encouraged his interest in Irish song. Behan’s appreciation was often expressed
with the occasional shilling or two.
Danny avers he was fortunate to be born into an Ireland still immersed in the Irish oral
tradition. This tradition had flourished since the arrival of the Celts, five hundred years before the coming of Christ. The
new nation, one that had survived the centuries old attempts to subjugate it, was emerging into a dramatically changing new world
and “the national radio service, Radio Eireann, did much to foster the folk tradition and celebrate the new nationhood with programming
that reflected the Irish heritage and character,” said Danny, “But forty years later, this heritage would be hard to find on Irish
air-waves, subsumed and almost swamped by a deluge of ‘rock & roll drivel and pop pabulum.’
Danny is eternally grateful to
the radio of his childhood, which helped him to learn of the depth and richness of Irish culture. He remembers that, "There
was for me excitement in the discovery of every new song, play, poem and story."
