Blind Mary

"Blind Mary" is the English of its Irish title, Máire Dhall, and the name points to a real person — a blind woman harper from Carolan's own part of the country, one of the few women known in the profession and the teacher of Rose Mooney, who played at the Belfast Harp Meeting of 1792. The tune is usually credited to Turlough O'Carolan (1670–1738), though the attribution is shakier than most. It reached print through William Forde's Encyclopaedia of Melody, from which Francis O'Neill copied it, and Donal O'Sullivan, editing Carolan's collected works, found it so unlike the harper's other melodies that "but for Forde's high authority we should hardly be justified in including it." Derek Bell and Joanie Madden are among the many who have recorded it.