For some 25 years, Gloucester resident Michael O’Leary has been exploring, and celebrating, the connections between song and sea. 

O’Leary has organized and led a series of regularly occurring “Celtic Music Sunset Sails” around Gloucester Harbor on the schooner Ardelle, inviting Celtic musicians and singers from the Greater Boston area to join him in providing on-board entertainment for passengers. On land, O’Leary has appeared at numerous festivals and concerts, among them the Rockport Celtic Festival, Dorchester Irish Festival, BCMFest, and NEFFA, mixing in traditional or contemporary maritime songs with his impressive repertoire of Irish ballads. 

O’Leary is equally at home in an informal setting, like a pub or a living room. When someone says, “Give us a song, Michael!” he’ll think for a few seconds, and depending on the mood and the moment, maybe he’ll launch into something rousing:

All for me beer and tobacco

I’ve spent all me tin, on the lassies drinking gin

And across the western ocean I must wander

Or perhaps something quieter:

The curraghs are sailing way out on the blue,

Laden with herring of silvery hue,

O silver the herring, silver the sea

Soon there’ll be silver for baby and me

Now, O’Leary has embarked on a special project to spotlight an all but forgotten vestige of his adopted home’s maritime legacy. With the help of a microgrant from Awesome Gloucester, a chapter of global nonprofit The Awesome Foundation, as well as grants from the Gloucester and Manchester cultural councils – which in turn are supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council – O’Leary is helping organize and participating in several events this month and next [see details at the end of the story] revolving around the 150th anniversary of the book “Fishermen’s Ballads and Songs of the Sea.” 

Compiled and published in 1874 by brothers George H. and Francis Procter, who ran a stationery firm and published the weekly Cape Ann Advertiser in Gloucester, “Fishermen’s Ballads and Songs of the Sea” features 120 pieces by various writers that relate to maritime life and events. A few selections and their authors are well known, like “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and “The Cumberland” by Henry Longfellow and “Little Billee” by William Makepeace Thackery, but the vast majority are by Gloucester and other Cape Ann area fishermen and mariners as well as other local voices, including those of women. Some authors were given aliases (“Yankee Ned”) or identified only by initials; others were not identified at all. 

O’Leary, who calls the book “a literary, musical, and folkloric time capsule,” has added some enhancements to the original: He has created an author index and is working on a categories index and a digital table of contents. He has composed music for 24 pieces and plans to do so for more, although he feels some read better as poems to be recited. And he will continue to do research so as to identify the fishermen-authors and delve deeper into the stories behind the songs.

“With this project I am fulfilling the longing of the ghosts of these songs and poems, the vast majority of which have gone unspoken and unsung, even unseen, for decades,” O’Leary says. “I feel that what I’m doing goes beyond some personal, artistic ideal. It’s a way of preserving our maritime heritage and culture, and in ways that promote community togetherness and appreciation.”

Showcasing and sustaining maritime song and culture, whether through the book project or his Celtic music sails, is not exactly the culmination of a lifelong dream for O’Leary, a self-described landlubber who grew up in South Dakota – hardly a locus of seafaring activity. Then again, though his family has a strong Irish heritage, O’Leary couldn’t have imagined becoming a fount of Irish songs and ballads: Growing up, he recalls, about the only regular exposure he had to Irish music was a record the family would put on the stereo as part of their St. Patrick’s Day observance; and no, he can’t even remember what the album was.

But an almost yearlong sojourn in Ireland in 1978-79 on a Rotary International Fellowship changed his life. A defining event was when Clannad performed in the student union at University College Dublin, where O’Leary was studying. 

“I was just blown away, and I wound up coming home with three of their albums,” recalls O’Leary, who adds that he was “smitten” by the band’s lead singer, Moya Brennan.  

While O’Leary didn’t start making the round of sessions (“I really didn’t know about that world”), from thereon he did have his antenna up for Irish music, and in March of 1979 he attended a Bothy Band concert, an experience that left him “gobsmacked.”

His newfound interest in Irish music stayed with him after he returned to the US, and during a period in which he lived in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, he had another opportunity to see Clannad. But he didn’t start singing until after he moved to Cape Ann in 1989, and gradually was drawn to the very active Greater Boston Irish music scene.

“There were just a lot of things going on that compelled me to want to sing, and opportunity upon opportunity seemed to come my way,” says O’Leary, who remembers his first solo gig, at a Burns Night celebration in a Unitarian church.

Boston College’s Gaelic Roots annual summer festival (now a concert series taking place during the BC academic year) was a key facet of O’Leary’s musical development. “It made such a difference, because there were so many great singers who were there as teachers as well as performers: Frank Harte, Niamh Parsons, Andy Irvine, Aoife Clancy, Jimmy Crowley. Going there really helped me in finding my voice – and finding songs.”

O’Leary began showing up at local sessions and other events, such as Shay Walker’s singers club at Paddy Burke’s, or at the revered Green Briar session in Brighton. And his circle of musical friends and acquaintances became ever larger, which led to some formative experiences. One of these came when, thanks to a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, he was able to study with Bridget Fitzgerald, a traditional singer and former member of the groundbreaking band Cherish the Ladies. 

Much as he relished singing Irish songs, O’Leary was increasingly drawn to sea chanteys and other kinds of maritime songs. “Being where I was, living right near the harbor, it was almost impossible not to take an interest in songs and poems about the sea. And the more songs I learned, the more I wanted to know the stories behind them, and the people who lived that life.”

Having set poems to music – those of William Butler Yeats in particular – over the years, O’Leary had an idea: Why not do so for poetry on maritime and nautical life that related to Gloucester and Cape Ann? It wasn’t a project so much as “something I had in the back of my mind for a while,” he recalls.

But then he stumbled upon the Procters’ book via the Cape Ann Museum in 2022, and the something-in-the-back-of-his-mind moved decidedly to the forefront. 

“I looked through the pages, searching for anything I might be able to set to music. Some of the material didn’t really appeal to me, but it’s such a diverse collection and I was amazed by a lot of what I found. What struck me was that, while they used poems by published writers like Longfellow and Thackery, the Procters recruited fishermen and other people who hadn’t had that experience to contribute to the collection.”  

While the collection contains some idealized and romanticized depictions, O’Leary found that on the whole, “Fishermen’s Ballads and Songs of the Sea” portrays seafaring life in a straightforward, plainspoken manner. Sarah G. Duley’s “Saturday Afternoon,” for example, describes in very simple terms a fisherman’s family waiting for him to return, the mother working at her shuttle to repair a fishing net while the three children play on the shore. “Outward Bound,” credited to D.W. Hillier, expresses with an economy of words the conflicting emotions at the start of another voyage.

“Somebody asked me to sum up the book in one word, and the one that came to mind is ‘grief,’” he says. “The Procters didn’t pull any punches in putting this collection together. There are some very poignant pieces, dealing with loss of friends and concern about loved ones, either those going to sea or those left behind.”

O’Leary points to a poem by the fisherman Daniel McDonald, “The Weather Gage,” about the loss of his three friends on Georges Banks, and three by Captain Peter Sexton, including “The Loss of Life at Sea,” which recounts the sinking of several ships on a stormy night, resulting in 36 deaths: “Our vessels of the best, our men are brave and smart/The hardships of these noble men would grieve the human heart/We must not think of gloom too much, while in this life we stay/But make ourselves contented until we pass away.”

“I try to imagine what it must’ve been like to sit down and write a poem like that,” says O’Leary. “It’s great literature for what these poems are and what they deal with.”

Harry L. Marcy’s supernatural-themed “The Ghostly Crew” – which alludes to actual events in Gloucester in 1869 – has had a considerable reach and influence, serving as the basis for “The Spirit Song of Georges Banks” by Maine singer-songwriter Gordon Bok, whose music has been a source of inspiration for O’Leary.

“Pat’s Farewell” by Mabel Lee, meanwhile, is a “holy grail of a song” for O’Leary, since it concerns both Irish emigration and Gloucester fishing, not to mention the ship the Alfred Walen, which was built less than a mile from where he lives. The poem is among the 24 he has set to music.

“I’m certainly not done with this project, but it’s already been very fulfilling,” says O’Leary. “I think these poems and songs really help bring history to life, in a way that’s quite personal and relatable. The world they describe may be gone, but it won’t be forgotten.”

O’Leary will give a talk and performance based on “Fishermen's Ballads and Songs of the Sea” on Aug. 22 at 5 p.m. at the Sawyer Free Library in Gloucester. There is limited seating and reservations, which are required, can be made here .

On Sept. 7, O’Leary will present “Of Quarries and Dories” in Rockport as part of the Jonathan Bayliss Society Conference, which this year is themed “Granite and the Sea: Exploring the History, Nature, and Arts of Cape Ann's Rocky Coast.” Reservations and information available at this link.

In honor of World Maritime Day on Sept. 28, O’Leary will offer a free talk, with performance, on “Fishermen's Ballads and Songs of the Sea” at the Cape Ann Museum. For time and other details, and to make reservations, see the museum website. 

For more information on these and other events, see facebook.com/michael.oleary.222/