Blind Mary: A Song History
"Blind Mary" is a slow air credited to the blind harper Turlough O'Carolan (1670–1738), but the credit is thin. It rests on the nineteenth-century collector William Forde: Francis O'Neill copied the tune from Forde's Encyclopaedia of Melody (c. 1845) for his Music of Ireland (1903). Donal O'Sullivan, in his 1958 study of Carolan's life and music, did not find it typical of Carolan's melodies and admitted it to the canon only out of respect for Forde's authority.[1] IMSLP, which treats the authorship as disputed, notes an early printing in Forde's National Melodies of the British Isles around 1841 with no composer named.[2]
Ireland’s treasures – a sweet daughter of Erin with her harp, stereograph, American Stereoscopic Company, 1903. Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. A posed studio view with no connection to Carolan or this tune.
The sources consulted here do not establish who Mary was. The Traditional Tune Archive suggests that, if the tune is Carolan's, it was probably written for Máire Dhall ("Blind Mary"), a blind woman harper from his own district and one of the few women recorded in that profession; Charles O'Conor's diary records his younger brothers taking harp lessons from a woman of that name in 1726.[1] The identification is a reasonable guess rather than a documented fact.
Doubtful or not, the tune has travelled well. It was printed in mid-nineteenth-century collections by Surenne (1854) and Haverty (1859) and in P. W. Joyce's Old Irish Folk Music and Songs (1909), and it was recorded by the Chieftains in 1976, by harper Derek Bell, and by Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick; the Tune Archive adds that it has lately found favour with flute players.[1][3]
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