O'Dowda, Brendan Joseph (1925–2002), singer, was born 1 October 1925 in Dundalk, Co. Louth, the youngest of a family of seven boys and three girls of Francis Joseph O'Dowda (d. 1955) from Cork, who worked in the engineering department of the post office, and his wife Josephine (née Brunton) (d. 1983), a native of Co. Kilkenny. The family lived in Moira Terrace, Castletown Road, Dundalk, and afterwards on Point Road. Brendan was educated locally by the De la Salle Brothers, and was very keen on sports; in athletics he was Louth champion at 250 yards as a youth, and he was on the school Gaelic football team. He progressed to playing football at county level, captaining the Louth team which won the minor final in 1942, and in 1944 and 1946 was on the senior team which won the Leinster championship.
By his late teens, the possibility of making a career in singing had become important to him and, on his teacher's advice, he reluctantly gave up football rather than risk bad weather damaging his throat or lungs. He first sang in public in a school operetta, making a name for himself at the age of nine. As a teenager, while he was singing for his friends on a visit to Omeath, hotel guests admired his voice and introduced him to a priest, Fr Farragher of St Augustine's church in Drogheda. Fr Farragher persuaded O'Dowda to sing in St Augustine's choir, and also introduced him to Dr Vincent O'Brien (qv), director of the Palestrina choir in Dublin. O'Brien had been the teacher of the celebrated tenor John McCormack (qv), and recognised O'Dowda's potential. After he left school, a job in a Dublin office was found for him, and he was given free private lessons by O'Brien, who thought that his young protégé should train as an opera singer. O'Dowda came to prefer lighter, more popular music, and performed as an amateur in many charity and other concerts. When he was 21, he left Dublin for London to make a career as a professional musician; there he was a founder member of the Four Ramblers, a group that specialised in easy listening music, and which was soon appearing on popular BBC radio shows.
O'Dowda's beautiful tenor voice, and a charming and relaxed manner in stage shows as well as on air, brought him immediate popularity, and he was soon in demand as a solo performer; he had a two-year contract to appear in the London Palladium and later did summer seasons in seaside towns. He was frequently a guest on the radio variety shows that were a staple of light entertainment after the second world war, and sold out a two-week season of concerts at the Theatre Royal, Dublin. His first record, Emerald and tartan (1956?), included two songs by Percy French (qv), and established O'Dowda as an outstanding interpreter of French's characteristically humorous but beautifully crafted Irish songs. Thereafter, at least ten best-selling LP records and frequent broadcasts on BBC radio and television made him a familiar figure in the UK and Ireland. Shows in the Grove Theatre, Belfast, broke records for attendance; O'Dowda had achieved a surprising level of popularity in Northern Ireland (surprising, given that for some northern protestants at the time, anyone with a 'Gaelic' name was somewhat suspect). He hosted television shows in the UK in the 1960s, and compèred a televised cabaret concert from Dublin's Gresham Hotel, during which he performed Percy French songs, on the first night of broadcasting from Telefís Éireann (31 December 1961). He won Billboard international awards in the United States for his first two LPs, often toured in America, sold many records there, and appeared on leading US television shows; he also performed in Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. A fan club, the Brendan O'Dowda Circle, was established, and enthusiasts travelled long distances to attend all his concerts.
The link with Percy French became very important to O'Dowda, who developed a one-man show based on French's songs. It was broadcast on BBC Northern Ireland in 1978, as part of a series of six hour-long programmes on French's life in which O'Dowda was a prominent contributor. He researched French's life and career, getting in touch with surviving French family members in quest of lost songs, and produced two biographies. The world of Percy French, a successful illustrated volume, was first published in 1981, and appeared in reprints in 1991 and 1997. This was followed by French (1997), based on hitherto unpublished papers, and described in the Irish Times of 23 February 2002 as the definitive work on its subject. O'Dowda admired all aspects of French's work, and owned a number of his paintings.
French's songs, and O'Dowda's chosen singing style, had never been too well regarded by highbrow critics, but fell out of fashion more generally as the 1980s came to an end. News of O'Dowda's death in Gosport War Memorial Hospital, Hampshire, England, on 22 February 2002, however, reminded many people of a time when humour often found its way into songwriting, and teenagers and older generations had not yet separated into opposing musical and cultural camps.
O'Dowda had lived for most of his career in Hampshire, where he had developed business interests including the manufacture of stage and dance costumery. His second wife, Alice (née Boyle), who was from Chapelizod in Dublin, had been a champion Irish dancer and ran successful Irish dancing schools in England. They had married in the church of the Sacred Heart in Fareham, Hampshire, in October 1975. His first marriage, on 3 June 1948, was to Sheila Kelly, and took place in Corpus Christi church in Glasnevin, Dublin.
After a funeral mass in Chapelizod, Brendan O'Dowda was buried in Esker cemetery, Lucan, Co. Dublin. He was survived by Alice O'Dowda and by five sons and two daughters. His third son, also Brendan O'Dowda, is a senior Thames Valley police officer who in October 2013 became assistant chief constable commanding the organised crime and counter-terrorism units for south-east England.