Biography:By the time of his death in the US in 1984 Seosamh Ó hÉanaí was Ireland's best known singer of traditional songs in Irish, an sean-nós, and unique among sean-nós singers in pursuing his art with an ambition and constancy which demanded that he live by his singing. While his contemporaries, Nioclás Tóibín, Darach Ó Catháin and Máire Áine Ní Dhonnachadha all had greater vocal range, Ó hÉanaí's voice had a low, deep resonance which was unmatchable in its charge.
The supreme irony of his career is that he only managed to attain his ambition through emigration in 1966 to the US, this from an Ireland in the throes of a folk music and ballad revival. Although he received support from Ronnie Drew, Liam Clancy and others, the general ballad audience saw him as representing a Gaelic peasant Ireland now superseded, and when Ó hÉanaí appeared at a folk-ballad concert in the Grafton Cinema in the early 1960s he was booed off the stage.
Irish cultural insecurity was manifested with equal nakedness during an international tour of the show Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake, devised by the American composer John Cage with Ó hÉanaí's live singing at its centre.
This had opened in the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1980, but when, in 1982, it was offered free of charge to the organisers of the Dublin Bloomsday, it was turned down.
Similarly, various attempts to obtain Arts Council support led to nothing, notwithstanding the fact that since each sean-nós song is improvised as it is sung, exponents of the art are necessarily composers as well as singers and so ought to be entitled to Aosdána membership.
SEOSAMH Ó HÉANAÍ was born in An Aird Thoir, Carna, Connemara in 1919, and this book offers an extensive and informative account of his life and cultural background. Following his unexplained expulsion from a preparatory college for teachers, he worked at a variety of labouring jobs in England and Scotland, settling for a while in Glasgow in the late 1940s, where he married and had four children.
He regularly disappeared from the family home, finally deserting it and not returning even when his children were effectively orphaned by the death of his wife in 1966.
By then he was back in Dublin, where he took up near-permanent residence in O'Donoghue's pub in Merrion Row. An RTÉ documentary on Ó hÉanaí, shown in 1995, included an interview with his son, Jackie, blind by then, who wished that he had had "a normal life", "a normal father".
Ó hÉanaí was fortunate to have come into contact with Gael Linn, which had on its staff highly competent managers and record producers. These arranged recordings and public concerts which allowed him to achieve a level of recognition, at least among speakers of Irish, which would have been impossible for singers of the preceding generation.
He was equally fortunate to have been adopted by the ethnomusicology department of the University of Washington in Seattle, where he was treated as a treasure while employed there as an artist-in-residence.
He returned regularly to Ireland during those years and this reviewer can well recall his bracing singing at a number of concerts in the Damer Hall during the 1970s.
Irish-America ignored his talents, an indifference seemingly abetted by his opposition to republican violence: his dominant audience in the States was white, educated, middle-class and non-Irish.
Wider American appreciation of his talents was given official form in 1982, when he was presented with the National Heritage Award for Excellence in Folk Arts, an award which seems to have pleased him more than anything else in his life.
Ó hÉanaí emerges from this well-written and thoroughly-researched biography as cantankerous and frustrated, a man who could only reach his inner self through song.
If the book has an outstanding fault it is the absence of an index, a lamentable omission from a book crowded with detail.
Proinsias Ò Drisceoil is one of the authors of Foclóir Litríochta agus Critice, a dictionary of literature and criticism in Irish, published by An Gúm
Seosamh Ó hÉanaí: Nár Fhágha Mé Bás Choíche By Liam Mac Con Iomaire Cló Iar-Chonnachta, 521pp. €35 (includes CD)