The Dollykits include (from left) Kelsey Arsenault and Katie Barbour.
By Craig Westcott / July 14, 2023
There's a new act performing at the annual Shamrock Folk Festival next weekend, but they're old hands at performing, despite their young faces, and no strangers to the stage in Ferryland.
The Dollykits are scheduled to play in the main event evening session Saturday night with the Masterless Men, Karla Pilgrim & The Mayflowers, and other special guests. The duo is composed of Kelsey Arsenault and Katie Barbour.
"We've been playing together for I would say 20 years," said Arsenault. "We grew up together, but as a duo we just started in the last year gigging together more seriously. But we've been playing together forever."
The pair, both actually from Ferryland, play everything from Irish traditional to country to folk covers "with a few of our own originals as well."
Both are extremely talented singer/songwriters in their own right.
"I've actually got a solo album coming out at the end of the summer," Arsenault noted, "and Katie has written some on her own. But we'd like to get into songwriting more as a duo as well."
Arsenault has a song debuting today, Volcano, which will also be included on the Gallery Walls album later this summer. If Volcano is anything to go by, the album will be well worth getting.
Arsenault said the pair won't be performing much of their original material at the festival, which is better designed for Irish-Newfoundland traditional sing along type music, which they both also enjoy.
Both artists have played the festival many times.
"I grew up playing the festival," said Arsenault. "It was my first gig actually. The first time I ever sang on the stage was up on the Southern Shore."
She was 4. Arsenault performed with her mom Rhonda O'Keefe Arsenault.
So far, the Dollykits have played The Black Sheep and O'Reilley's downtown.
"We've been busy all summer," said Arsenault. "We haven't done a ton of gigging this summer, but we also played at the Keeper's Kitchen up in St. Shotts."
The Shamrock festival will be the biggest crowd to see the pair perform together as the Dollykits. By all accounts, it will be worth seeing.
"They're really good," said Don Maher, co-owner of The Black Sheep on George Street. "They're really engaging. The audience here loved them."
Arsenault's full-time job, meanwhile, is with the CRA, but she is also a certified Music Therapist with a Masters degree from Waterloo University. Barbour is a teacher. But being from Ferryland, with music pretty well in the blood, neither can stay away from the call of singing and songwriting on the side.
The name of their act is a tribute to their respective grandmothers.
"My grandmother's name was Dolly (O'Keefe) and Katie's grandmother was Kit (Clowe)," said Arsenault. "The two of them have since passed away in the last couple of years, but we were both very close to our nans and we thought we'd do a spin on both their names as a way to kind of keep them alive and to breed a little bit of their legacy into what we do."
