This may amount to a whole bunch of nothing. However!

Delia Murphy, who recorded The Spinning Wheel, "spinning Eileen" and all, is much discussed on Mudcat threads. So is Mary O'Hara, who unlike Ms. Murphy actually played the harp and sang simultaneously, and who came a generation later than Ms. Murphy. I learned of both of these very popular, beloved recording artists from the Mudcat Café.

But although the Folkways album recorded by Deirdre Ní Fhloinn was something introduced to me in childhood, I was ignorant of the historical context in which she learned, and performed, her singing and harp playing. As stated in a post on another thread, the Folkways LP copy in my house was intact, including the little paper booklet for which that recording company was known, and which gave information for which there was no room on the liner notes on the record jackets. Ms. Ní Fhloinn's album booklet was limited to the song lyrics -- Gaelic, with one macaronic tune about a dialogue between a farmer and a fox -- and English translations of same. There was nothing whatever about the artist, Ms. Ní Fhloinn (also known, in her youth, as Deirdre Flynn), nor about where she learned the harp or who her teachers were.

Had it been otherwise, today I would probably be no wiser about The Spinning Wheel or Delia Murphy; but I would have learned then what I had to come here to learn, that Deirdre Ní Fhloinn, Kathleen Watkins, Deirdre O'Callaghan, and Mary O'Hara were all graduates of The Harp Room at Sion Hill convent school, where they studied singing with one of the Dominican nuns (in another post I said Ursuline nuns, sorry, I got that wrong), and learned the Celtic harp from one of the Ní Shéa sisters.

Although, since it was before my time, I still would have not seen that episode of the Ed Sullivan variety show on television, in which Mary O'Hara was a featured guest and about which she writes bluntly and bitterly in her memoirs, mincing no words about the patronizing, condescending treatment she received.

And it still would be news to me, that amongst fellow traditional musicians of a more recent generation, the example set by Mary O'Hara's generation would be belittled as follows:

"Kathleen Watkins, Deirdre O'Callaghan, and all the dear Spinning Eileens may still be charming the blue-rinse Yanks and mead-swilling Eurotourists in stone castles, but....[name withheld to protect the innocent] has taken the harp, with a little help from one Máire Ní Chathasaigh, out of the castles and back to its place in Irish trad music."
The preceding was written, NOT by the harpist whose name I have withheld, but by a journalist/critic for Arts West Magazine around 1999. Said writer is a trad musician whose name can be turned up in Mudcat threads using the search engine; for all I know, this writer might be a Mudcat member.

Well, once I was myself part of a class of students with a teacher or two, although not in a convent school; and I was exposed, however briefly, to the way that professional (especially academic) musicians talk about the profession and the people in it, to their blunt criticisms and decided opinions. So the preceding quote does not come as a complete shock even to me.

Still, I question: is it throwing the baby out with the bathwater, to dismiss Kathleen Watkins, Deirdre O'Callaghan, Deirdre Ní Fhloinn, Mary O'Hara, et alia, along with the tourist industry's exploitation of them and their image? What say you, Mudcatters?