James Keane, right, with brother Seán on fiddle and flutist Mick O’Connor

By the age of 11, along with his brother Seán, James Keane was performing with Pete Seeger on a Dublin stage. But the Keane brothers—James played button accordion, Seán, the fiddle—were normally more secretive about their music, as if they had been running guns for the IRA, not turning out reels and jigs.

“Back in the '50s and early '60s, when I was growing up, Irish traditional music was only played behind closed doors because it was very unwelcome in Dublin and certain garrison towns, mainly the cities that had been used for the British occupation,” explains Keane, now 58, and a pioneer in the renaissance of the music that was nearly a casualty of colonialism.

He reveals a little-known footnote to Irish history. “Under the British, traditional music was discouraged—and it wasn’t encouraged by the Catholic Church either. The music and the language were trounced out of people,” he says. “My mother and father were great fiddlers each, but even in the 1950s, if my father decided to take his fiddle into any bar in Dublin, the barman would be over the bar to put him out in the street. People today don’t realize how dangerous it was. You could be pulled out of your house and put in jail for playing or dancing to traditional music.”

Keane, who won four all-Ireland championships for his solo playing, only picked up the button accordion at the age of 6 because his uncle Mick, a Dublin policeman, was forced to store his own for safekeeping at the Keanes’ home in Drimnagh, a Dublin suburb.

“He had been keeping it at his barracks but people interfered with it and he wasn’t too happy about that,” recalls Keane. “When he came to our house every weekend for dinner, he’d have a little go at it. When Mick went home, I would carefully slip into the front room and take the accordion out from under the sofa and try to make something out of it. Then I would slip it carefully back. I taught myself to play with one finger. Then my father broke the news to me that you have to use all your fingers. It was a horrible realization.” He laughs.

Eventually, Keane worked his way up to all 10 fingers, and then attacked the next challenge—using all the buttons. Self-taught, he never knew “if I was getting much better or worse. I just loved it.”

Traditional music enthusiasts would say that Keane had the world’s best teacher, because he’s now considered one of the top button accordionists in the world. Shortly after immigrating to New York as a young man in 1968, he played Carnegie Hall (where a New York Times critic noted that he “swung through reels with such exciting drive that he virtually lifted the audience out of their seats.") He has his own signature accordion—the Keanebox from Castagnari Accordions. He’s made seven solo recordings and played on more than dozen others. When he returned to Dublin in 1991 for the Dublin Traditional Music Festival—discovering, he says, how times had changed—Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern himself walked across the stage, shook his hand, and welcomed him home.

With his brother Seán, the longtime fiddler with The Chieftains, Keane played a pivotal role in making a traditional music festival in Dublin possible. In the early 1960s, when the folk revival was just burgeoning in the .U.S, the teenaged Keanes and their friend, flute player Mick O’Connor, were forming a ceili band in a city where most people didn’t remember what a ceili was.

The Castle Ceili Band “had the greatest musicians in the world,” says Keane. In fact, the boys assembled their band from some of the top traditional musicians in Ireland, many from County Clare, where their father was born. “Oh, the cheek of us young lads going to people like the great John Kelly (famed fiddle and concertina player), (fiddler) Liam Rowsome, (fiddler) John Dwyer, (pianist) Bridie Lafferty and (drummer) Benny Carey. . .These were adults way older than ourselves who were steeped in traditional music,” recalls Keane. “Years later, we had to admit that they must have had respect for us too, because they all said yes.”

The Castle guaranteed a sold-out dance hall anywhere in the country, and won the All-Ireland Ceili Band Championship at the Fleadh Cheoil Na Eireann in County Tipperary in 1965. By then “Dublin was getting a little looser in the ceili,” says Keane. “Anywhere close to Dublin they treated Clare sets (a style that originated in County Clare) as a foreign dance. Then a group of Clare musicians and others started their own club in Dublin, the Mrs. Crotty Club, named after the famous concertina player from Kilrush whom we knew. We were with them every Thursday nights when sets were danced there.” (Set dances, a social tradition in Ireland for more than 150 years, are similar to—and probably the root of—American square dances.)

The band would also take Dublin dancers by bus to Clare, where the style had been on the wane. “Only in certain areas were sets being danced properly,” Keane says. “When we brought the Dubliners, the Clare people were amazed that people from Dublin knew all the footwork and everything that had been forgotten about in Clare. Eventually sets came back. Connie Ryan, a very famous set dancer who learned to dance in Mrs. Crotty’s Club, is considered the patriarch of getting sets back on track.”

Keane tells this tale of the resurrection of Irish trad in a series of five one-hour lectures that he recorded for The Smithsonian Institution. He’ll give an abbreviated version—though he’s so loquacious, that’s open to interpretation—on Saturday, Oct. 14, at the Coatesville Cultural Society, 143 E. Lincoln Highway in Coatesville from 4 to 6 p.m., just prior to his concert at 8 p.m. For tickets ($15 for the concert, $10 for the lecture, and $20 for both). Call (610) 486-2220 or (610) 925-6235.  For more information and to hear a sound clip visit the Coatesville Traditional Irish Music Series Web site. The event is co-sponsored by the Mid-Atlantic branch of Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann and irishphiladelphia.com.

You’ll get a second chance to hear Keane when his new group, Fingal (brand new—it was formed at the end of September, playing its first big gig at Seattle Town Hall) performs at the Irish Center/Commodore Barry Club, 6815 Emlen St., Philadelphia, on Saturday, Nov. 18, at 8:30 p.m. Workshops are being scheduled for 5 p.m.; e-mail Frank Dalton at Dalton@vet.upenn.edu for information or to sign up. Cost is $15 for the concert; $25 for the workshop; and $30 for the workshop and concert.