Ronnie Drew: Folk musician, singer and actor

Born: 16 September, 1934, in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin. Died: 16 August, 2008, in Dublin, aged 73.

IN JANUARY 2008, a crowd gathered at Dublin's Windmill Lane studios to pay tribute to one of the most distinctive voices and faces in contemporary Irish music. The assembly included members of U2, Kila, the Dubliners and the so-called Band of Bowsies – a Hiberno- English noun sitting between ne'er-do-wells and louts (with an alcoholic aura) – including Moya Brennan, Andrea Corr, Shane MacGowan, Christy Moore and Sinéad O'Connor. The song was The Ballad of Ronnie Drew. The target of the gathering's affection had been diagnosed with cancer of the throat in 2006. Ronnie Drew lived to see the song go to the top of the Irish charts. Its profits went to the Irish Cancer Society.

The song was co-written by Robert Hunter, whose lyrics set to music by Jerry Garcia helped define the Grateful Dead's creative juices, Bono and The Edge from U2 and Simon Carmody, whose take on the world had been coloured by collaborations with Gavin Friday and the Golden Horde. One section went, "Here's to you, Ronnie Drew/No stranger to devils or angles to tell."

Before going teetotal, Drew enjoyed more than his fair share of bowsying. With the Dubliners, he helped update the book on the subject. Folk music had suffered from stratum upon stratum of nay-saying and the Dubliners would have none of that. What set the group Drew co-founded in 1962 apart was that they were yes-sayers.

In 1967 the Dubliners burst into the Irish and the British consciousness with a variation on a folk song archetype. According to the Harvard scholar Francis James Child in his The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1884-1889) Our Goodman had antecedents in Ritson's Scotish Song and, in Jacobite disguise, in Smith's Scotish Minstrel. The Dubliners redefined its mutability.

Seven Drunken Nights combined riddle and innuendo in a tale of drunken befuddlement, improbabilities and cuckolding. (The sixth and seventh nights were left to the imagination.) RTÉ banned it – always handy for sales – while the pirate station Radio Caroline pumped it out on such heavy rotation that it was obvious Major Minor, the label upon which it appeared, had invested in airtime. David McWilliams's The Days of Pearly Spencer settled any lingering doubts on that score.

Ronnie Drew's voice was likened to many things including gravel, slate and cement. But that should be contextualised. He had a resplendent, working-class Co. Dublin accent – about as far removed as you could get from Count John McCormack and The Harp That Once Through Tara's Hall. As Author Chetan Karnani observed, many believe that "all art must, Antacus-like, grow from the soil". Drew's growl grew out of Ireland's soil. Before he found his singing voice, though, he plodded through any number of low-paid, no-hope jobs until eventually he emigrated to Spain, where he taught English.

Back in Dublin he fell in with a crowd based at O'Donoghue's famed pub in Merrion Row, where he could perform every so often. Around 1962, out of these meetings and party bashes grew the Ronnie Drew Group. Renaming themselves, they were the antithesis of the passionless heart of Joyce's tale "The Dead" in Dubliners. They tapped into something liberating and joyful.

They also trampled the old folk music sensibilities into the dust. It was unapologetically virile music. They created an Irish music template. With The Wild Rover, I'll Tell My Ma, Whiskey In The Jar and McAlpine's Fusiliers the Dubliners sidestepped or courted cliché.

That is adopting an intellectual position: in practice they wooed the fun back into folk music. Their energy and unruly musical wit shaped what came after them. Without them, Sweeney's Men, Planxty, the Bothy Band and the Pogues would have been different beasts – arguably might not have existed at all.

Their befriending Anne Briggs in Edinburgh in 1965 led directly to the singer visiting Ireland and uncorking new creativities. What they played was the stuff of public bar sessions where the next bloke asked: "Show me that again." And they would. One of the things that made the Dubliners was the contrast between Drew singing, say, Love Is Pleasing and Luke Kelly's smoother voice on, say, the Scots Traveller Jimmy MacBeath's Tramps And Hawkers.

Drew dipped in and out of the Dubliners (1962-74 and 1979-95), acted in theatre, film, television and revue and worked and recorded with many others, including Gilles Servat, the former De Dannan singer Eleanor Shanley and Jah Wobble. He also worked and recorded as a solo artist. Drew's far-from- Guinness-smooth voice was among the most evocative Ireland has ever created. Next time you hear Shane MacGowan sing, you may well listen out for ghost harmonies from Ronnie Drew.

His wife of 40 years, Deidre (née McCartan) predeceased him in 2007. He is survived by their son, daughter and five grandchildren.

KEN HUNT