My first encounter with Frank Harte had the characteristics of a ‘road to Damascus’ moment. If I had been on a horse I would certainly have fallen off it. It happened in Pigotts’ music shop at the bottom of Grafton Street, in the short window between the release of Frank’s first LP record – Dublin Street Songs – and the shop going up in flames. Both events, unconnected of course, occurred in 1967.

I had been drawn to ‘the ballads’ as a teenager for several reasons. At family parties everyone was expected to contribute a ‘party piece’; in the cub scouts (I never graduated to the senior branch, taking exception to the manner of the scout leader) we were encouraged to engage in sing-songs around the camp-fire; in youth-hostels a similar brand of self-entertainment was common; trips to the Gaeltacht as a gaeilgeoir exposed me to sean nós song; school teachers availed of opportunities to expose their classes to Irish songs; and classmates had got there before me, and introduced me to the recordings, then just beginning to be published, of the Dubliners and others.

Before the Dubliners it had been the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem that had caught my ear, and a couple of their songs were to become my standards at Christmas parties. When I heard the Dubliners, I was astounded by how much more ‘authentic’ they were, and I felt that I was travelling deeper into the forest. Seeing Joe Heaney, as the Dubliners’ guest, at their famous Gate Theatre concert in 1966, convinced me that I was on the right path to the heart of the matter.

However, browsing through the racks of vinyl in Piggotts in 1967 and happening on the sleeve of Frank’s first Topic album was an astounding experience. ‘Rooted to the spot’ doesn’t describe it. Of course I bought it (scrounging the money from my mother in whose company I was at the time), took it home, and in a few weeks I had transcribed and learned every song on it.

The cover picture was the hook that had dragged me in. I had been used to ballad singers being polished quasi-cabaret-acts, with professionally honed routines and accompaniment. In the moment of revelation I think I realised that I had been listening to singers of ballads, but had at last found the real thing – a ballad singer. The picture of a broken-down, open, Georgian door spoke to me of the street and the working class. The presence of informative notes on the songs (none of which I had ever heard of before) just reinforced my conviction that here was the real thing, an opinion of Frank that I have never had cause to reconsider.

It was many years before I met him in person, at a Góilín session, and I encountered him fairly frequently after that. He was a cheerful and affable friend and it was always a pleasure to be in his company. His conversation and humour I found entertaining, and his singing I found thrilling. He could recognise the particular things about tunes that placed them above the ordinary. For instance, his performance of Philip King’s wonderful tune to the song ‘I Am Stretched on Your Grave’ was so achingly bleak that, as a friend of mine commented, ‘it could strip paint’. He sang ‘Dunlavin Green’ to a version of the air in which each line of the tune ends on the key-note, where I had been used to hearing the third line end on the second (B if it’s sung to end on A). This could have produced a boring effect, but his florid treatment of the tune made it a triumph. The glee with which he performed ‘The Marmite Song’ and ‘When the Breakers Go Back on Full Time’ was infectious and always induced unrestrained laughter in his audience, as much in recognition of his clearly huge enjoyment of the songs as in the songs themselves.

His contributions to the tradition – his recordings, books, and sleeve notes – were important but, as he recognised, dispersed. Shortly before his death he expressed the wish that it could be gathered and published as a book. It was a good idea he had, and it has been a mixture of a duty and a pleasure to bring it to pass. He was, as he humorously asserted himself. ‘a national treasure’.