Sean Tyrrell isn’t a household name.

But the Irish folksinger is revered by those who appreciate Celtic music.

The word “legendary” is often used in association with the veteran artist.

Local singer/songwriter Michael Kelly Cavan is responsible for bringing Tyrrell to Waterloo Region.

“A few months ago, when I saw on Sean’s website that he was doing a mid-winter tour of the American Northeast, I thought, my God, I can’t let him be that close and not get to see him,” Cavan explains.

“So I started an email conversation that had him agree to come and play.”

Cavan, who was born in Ireland and raised in North Bay before moving to Kitchener via Stratford, remembers when he first heard Tyrrell.

“It brought me to tears. The authenticity of his voice and his unique mandocello accompaniment burrowed deep into me and gave me a musical experience I hadn’t felt in a long time.

“He’s an artist of rugged beauty, like the land from which he hails.”

Tyrrell interprets traditional songs, writes original songs and sets Irish poetry (both English and Gaelic) to music, including the poetry of W.B. Yeats, Francis Ledwidge (killed while serving in the First World War) and Michael Harnett, who died in 1999.

Kitchener’s Sean O’Seasnain was a worker-priest in Dublin when he met Harnett in the 1970s.

He has high praise for Tyrrell’s musical settings of Hartnell’s poems including Belladonna in the Bar and The Ghost of Billy Mulvihill.

“I can’t wait to hear Sean’s melodic, if not melancholic, rendering of Michael’s poetry,” O’Seasnain offers.

Although Tyrrell traverses the Atlantic from his native Galway on a regular basis, he doesn’t get to this part of the world very often.

In fact, his Waterloo Region debut at the Registry Theatre on Friday is the only Canadian gig on his current North American tour.

Raised in a musical family, Tyrrell started performing in folk clubs in west Ireland in the 1960s. He immigrated to New York in 1968, moved to San Francisco and then to New Hampshire.

He returned to Ireland in the late 1970s, but didn’t resume music in a big way until a decade later, when he created a stage work based on Brian Merriman’s 18th-century epic poem The Midnight Court.

After recording with acclaimed uileann piper Davy Spillane, Tyrrell recorded his debut album Cry of a Dreamer, followed by The Orchard, Belladonna and a greatest hits package Rising Tide, later reissued as The Best Of Sean Tyrrell: Man for Galway.

Tyrell keeps a busy international touring schedule, spanning Great Britain, North America, Europe and Australia.

The release of his most recent album Walker of the Snow coincides nicely with his Registry appearance.

Five years in the making, the album includes a musical setting of 19th-century Dublin poet Charles Dawson Shanly’s ghostly tale set in the Yukon, in addition to covers of Tom Paxton’s Can’t Help but Wonder Where I’m Bound and a haunting reading of the old chestnut You Are My Sunshine.