Scottish minstrel Robin Williamson ended the introduction of his book, Fiddle Tunes, which includes four of O'Carolan's, by calling Celtic music "an acorn that will grow another forest yet." That he could have been talking about one man makes me wonder how many more acorns we have yet to tend, forests to realize...

Born in 1670, the son of subsistence farmers, Turlough (TUR-lock) O'Carolan moved when he was about 14 with his parents to County Roscommon, the very center of Ireland, when his father, John, took the job of blacksmith for the MacDermott Roe family. At the age of 18 he lost his sight to smallpox, and as was the custom for the blind at the time, was given a musical instrument--in his case, a harp.

His sudden show of musical talent, combined with an ebullient and outgoing nature unhampered by his illness, caught the attention of Mrs. MacDermott Roe who took enough interest in young O'Carolan to hire a personal tutor for him. By the time he turned 21, she provided him with a guide and a pair of horses to tour the country. So began the career of perhaps the most celebrated itinerant minstrel in history.

Although melodic lines are all that remain of O'Carolan's tunes today, it is clear that he drew on the influences of Italian Baroque composers who enjoyed immense popularity in Ireland at the time, such as Vivaldi, Corelli, Albinoni, and especially Francesco Geminiani who lived in Dublin for twelve years while O'Carolan toured the countryside.

While there is no record of their ever meeting, Geminiani, hearing of O'Carolan, wanted to test him. Choosing a movement from his newest composition which had yet to be played publically, Geminiani made a new copy and deliberately weakened a few passages before sending it to the harper for an opinion. In a room full of friends, O'Carolan listened to a musician's rendition and joined in the subsequent applause. When it subsided, however, he startled his friends with the pronouncement that while it was very nice, indeed, "here and there it limps and stumbles."

When the musician replayed it, O'Carolan stopped him "here and there" and directed a music copyist to make changes on Geminiani's manuscript. Back it went. According to legend, Geminiani gasped when he saw it and made his own pronouncement: "Il genio vero della musica!"

Also among O'Carolan's appreciators was Jonathan Swift--or, Dean Swift as he's almost always identified in Irish histories--who translated an ancient Gaelic text for which O'Carolan composed "O'Rourke's Noble Feast." The tee-totalling Swift, however, through no fault of his own, was no particular friend of the hard-drinking O'Carolan. One night, finding O'Carolan drunk outside a public-house from which he had just been asked to leave, Swift thought he would try his Anglican best to reform the souse under the pretext of helping him home.

O'Carolan gave Swift an address and blubbered apologies and resolutions to the stern preacher all the way to it. Once there, a bewildered Swift protested that they had arrived at another public-house. "Yes, and I thank you for getting me here," O'Carolan likely answered as he found his own way through the door.

Scottish poet Robert Burns, who would have made the harper a far better companion if not for being born 21 years after O'Carolan's death, also wrote lyrics for several of his tunes. Though one was a lyricist and the other an instrumentalist, it is fair to call O'Carolan Ireland's Robert Burns--or Ireland's Stephen Foster to put him in an American context. In a modern context, his biographies suggest a comparison to Stevie Wonder.

O'Carolan's songs play in the keys of life. They appeal to the highest human instincts and are flush with treasures of nature: the fall of water, the slope of a hill, the twist of a wind-blown leaf, colors of apples and pears, the sparkle of moon and stars, the mad-happy dance of flames in the fireplace, the tumble and first steps of toddlers... Even his saddest laments offer an underlying optimism, a reaffirmation of love and life.

On March 25, 1738, O'Carolan died following a long illness. While on his deathbead at the home of Mrs. MacDermott Roe, he summoned for his harp and played a tune that had just come to him. The result, "Farewell to Music," is among the most frequently recorded of his tunes, one that is often compared to the music of J.S. Bach, and adapted with full orchestration by Chieftain Paddy Moloney for the score of a 2001 Swedish film called Under the Sun.

While he lay dying, word spread throughout Ireland, and, according to his biographer, "upwards of 60 clergymen...and a vast concourse of people assembled... erected tents in the field. The harp was heard in every direction..."

Among those in attendance was a doctor from Belfast who later realized that few if any of O'Carolan's songs had been written down and were in danger of being lost. In the summer of 1741 he invited to Belfast as many of Ireland's harpers as he could, and asked that they extend the invitation to others.

But these gatherings were sporadic at best. The English accumulation of wealth and influence in Ireland during the half-century following O'Carolan's death did not at all favor Celtic culture and art--in fact, often banned it--and a society in which itinerant minstrels could thrive was now unable to sustain itself. Hence, O'Carolan's reputation as "the last of the great Celtic bards."

This changed in 1792 when a 19-year-old church organist named Edward Bunting made it his mission to complete the work of the Belfast doctor and copy as many of O'Carolan's tunes as harpers all over Ireland still played. To that end he organized the Belfast Harp Festival, picking up where the doctor left off. Hence, the spontaneous gathering for O'Carolan's prolonged wake was the forerunner of the two- and three-day folk festivals that became popular in America and Canada in the late 70's and remain so to this day.

Call it a harp convention or a compositional summit, Bunting managed to save more than 230 of O'Carolan's songs--no telling how many more he may have written--and dozens of songs by fellow and rival harpists, such as Rory O'Dahl, whom O'Carolan admired to the point of envy. When hearing of O'Carolan's remark to the effect that he wished he had written O'Dahl's "Give Me Your Hand" more than any of his own songs, Bunting misunderstood the story and attributed the song to him with the title "O'Carolan's Favorite."Ê The Belfast Harp Society was an immediate outgrowth of the 1792 festival and is today the oldest musical organization of any kind anywhere in the world. In the 1950s a young son of Belfast named Derek Bell enrolled in the society's school, taking up musical scholarship and reseach as well as the harp. In the archives he found the sheets of O'Carolan's music copied out nearly two centuries earlier.

When Bell joined The Chieftains in the early 70's, he infused their driving, rock-and-rollesque arrangements of jigs and reels with O'Carolan's tunes. While the Chieftains had already ignited an explosion of interest in Celtic music five years earlier, it was their match with Bell that lit the world of folk music with O'Carolan's Baroque-Celtic tunes in countless versions, interpretations, tempos, instrumentations.

In the mid-70s I, a restless vagabond who gained admission into the graduate school of journalism at South Dakota State University, mostly as an excuse for some kind of adventure away from my native Massachusetts, was listening to a National Public Radio syndicated show called Ballad, Bards, and Bagpipes. One of BB&B's weekly installments was dedicated to the music of O'Carolan, and I, who dabbled in Celtic music merely as a hobby and had never heard of any particular bard apart from the one who wrote plays, happened to record it.

The repeated playing of that tape caused me to forget journalism to devote more time and attention to music. As I still tell friends and family, "These songs seem to be written for me." And I'll second the verdict of the Italian master whose test O'Carolan did far more than pass:

This is the greatest genius of music!