And with Reg Hall's book, one comes full circle in a sense.

This thread made much of "The Spinning Wheel," a popular song made famous by Delia Murphy, whose recording dominated the airwaves for the better part of a generation; it turns out that this song has a composer and lyricist who can be identified, as earlier posts have pointed out. However this song's popularity has nudged it into trad-music territory, or, at least, in that grey area where the two territories overlap.

Delia Murphy is one of the Irish performers given attention, in loving detail, in Reg Hall's book, which means that "The Spinning Wheel" is mentioned as well.

Hall's focus is largely, though not exclusively, on sessions, however; and it covers a fixed period of time. It is for this reason that the book says so little about the Irish harp. You have to look closely for the paragraph in which Hall considers the harp. And his statements cannot be faulted for their veracity. The harp was in a peculiar state of transition during the time covered by the book, because of the conflicting, complex factors covered over the course of the posts on this very thread.