The sound Paddy Keenan pulled from the uilleann pipes in the 1970s had not been heard from that instrument before: driving, urgent, roughened at the edges in a way that made listeners think less of parlour music than of rock and roll. Musicians took to calling him the Jimi Hendrix of the uilleann pipes. Keenan, a founding member of the Irish traditional group The Bothy Band and one of the most influential pipers of his generation, died on September 9, 2026. He was 76.

He was born on January 30, 1950, in Trim, Co Meath, into an Irish Traveller family for whom piping was already an inheritance. His father, John Keenan Sr., and his grandfather before him were both working uilleann pipers, and Paddy was the third generation to take up the instrument, starting on tin whistle before his father began teaching him the pipes around age ten, according to RTE. His mother, Mary Bravender Keenan, came from a settled family in Co Cavan and played accordion; the family later settled in Ballyfermot, Dublin, where Paddy performed as a boy with his father and brothers Johnny and Thomas in a family group called The Pavees. By fourteen he was playing his first major concert, at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin. The Irish Music Rights Organisation later described his sound as a flowing, open-fingered style traceable to great Traveller pipers of an earlier generation, among them Johnny Doran, a lineage Keenan carried forward and then bent into something no one in that line had played before.

At seventeen he left Ireland for England, busking on the streets of London and then across Europe, and it was there that a blues inflection worked its way into his piping, according to paddykeenan.com. That hybrid sound was fully formed by 1975, when Keenan joined Donal Lunny, Matt Molloy, Paddy Glackin, Tony MacMahon, Micheal O Domhnaill and Triona Ni Dhomhnaill to form The Bothy Band, releasing his self-titled solo debut on Mulligan Records the same year. In just four years, before the group disbanded in 1979, The Bothy Band is widely credited with changing the shape of Irish traditional music, wrapping ancient dance tunes in fast, tightly drilled ensemble arrangements built around Keenan's chanter. In 1978, between Bothy Band commitments, he recorded the duet album Doublin' with fiddler Paddy Glackin, Lunny again on bouzouki and Noel Kenny on concertina.

The solo career that followed the band's breakup carried him further than a Meath childhood could have suggested. He toured Japan, Europe, Australia and North America, and played festivals as far-flung as the Rainforest World Music Festival in Borneo and CeltFest Cuba in Havana. He composed and arranged music for the 1997 film Traveller, starring Bill Paxton and Mark Wahlberg, and in 2008 his collaboration with Liam O Maonlai at Mali's Festival au Desert was documented in the film Dambe: The Mali Project. Irish music's own institutions caught up with what audiences abroad had already sensed: in 2002 he won the TG4 Gradam Ceoil Ceoltoir na Bliana, the country's musician of the year award, and in 2011 the Irish Music Association gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award.

He kept teaching as he kept playing. "I love to see a new generation take on the pipes, but I won't pretend they're easy to learn," he told the Irish Independent in 2020, a line RTE returned to in its tribute this week. In 2023 he reunited with his surviving Bothy Band bandmates for a documentary project and performed at the Irish Traditional Music Archive's Drawing from the Well tribute concert at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, a reunion that carried the band onto an Irish tour in 2024, roughly forty-five years after they had first stopped playing together.

Tributes arrived quickly from the community that had shaped him and the one he had shaped in turn. Na Piobairi Uilleann, the Society of Irish Pipers, called him "an inspirational musician" whose "deeply expressive chanter playing coupled with his supreme technique displayed his total mastery of the instrument." The Irish Traditional Music Archive described him as one of the most popular uilleann pipers of all time. Irish Music Magazine said his playing "inspired generations of musicians and helped secure the uilleann pipes a central place on the international stage." Cork Folk Festival organiser Will Hammond said he was "deeply saddened with the passing of a great uilleann piper," and Pavee Point, the Traveller and Roma rights organization, called him "an inspiration and a source of immense pride to many Travellers." And Donal Lunny, who had stood beside him on stage for The Bothy Band's entire run, reached again for the phrase the trad world had settled on decades earlier to describe his old bandmate: the Jimi Hendrix of the pipes.

Keenan's Traveller heritage was never incidental to his music. It was the source of it: a chanter passed hand to hand through a family that had carried the pipes when settled Ireland had largely set them aside, and a style forged as much on London Underground platforms and European streets as in any concert hall. That the National Concert Hall and the Society of Irish Pipers spoke of him in the same week as Pavee Point spoke of him said something about how far the instrument, and the community that had kept it alive, had travelled together.

What stays behind is on record, literally: the 1975 Bothy Band albums, the solo debut, Doublin', the international festival tapes, Dambe: The Mali Project, all still there to be put on. It is also in every piper who ever tried to chase that open, forceful, faintly distorted sound out of a set of pipes strapped to their own elbow, a lineage running from his grandfather and father through him and now outward, in the hands of players he never met, into rooms he never played.