David O’Docherty was remembered by Island friends and family this week as a gifted musician, an expert in traditional Irish music, artist and storyteller.

Mr. O’Docherty died while swimming in Katama Bay on Saturday morning, Massachusetts state police confirmed on Sunday. He was 75 and had come to the Vineyard last week to play the tin whistle for the annual Bloomsday celebration in Vineyard Haven.

A resident of Lynn, he had been coming to the Vineyard since 1973 and had lived on the Island for a time in the late 1970s.

Born in Dublin in 1935, Mr. O’Docherty’s parents were both involved in the Irish independence movement from the late 1900s until the early 1920s, his wife Gail said yesterday. He attended Clongowes Wood and University College in Dublin, the same schools James Joyce attended. Following graduation from the National School of Art in Dublin, he lived in Paris for a few years in the 1960s, and then moved to London for about 10 years. In 1973 he moved to the United States, where he lived in New York city before moving to the greater Boston area. “He had known Lucia Moffett in his Paris days and it was at her invitation that he first came to the Island,” his wife said.

In 1973 he performed in a concert at the youth hostel in West Tisbury. The event was written up in the Vineyard Gazette, which described him as “a long-haired, black-bearded young Dubliner who is starting an Irish folk music concert tour of the United States.”

In an interview with the paper, Mr. O’Docherty spoke about his passion for Irish folk music, which began as a child, “as soon as I realized that Haydn and all those people were basing their tunes on country dancing. Why, I can play Haydn jigs from flute quartets and they’re almost Irish jigs!” he exclaimed. “Then 10 years ago I went back to the west of Ireland to paint it and I discovered that there were still outposts of music blazing away there and not even the great institutions of Irish folklore at the universities were interested in it.”

What followed was Mr. O’Docherty’s project to record thousands of Irish airs and traditional music that now rest in the Irish national archives in Dublin.

He was a virtuoso musician, highly accomplished at the piano, flute and tin whistle, his wife said. But he earned his living as an artist, with a special interest in portraits. “Faces were his thing; sometimes portraits of real people, sometimes imaginary faces,” she said, adding: “He really saw himself as an artist and saw the music as his hobby, but the art was in a way much more personal and was more of a creative effort.” For the past 10 years in Lynn he had a studio under the auspices of Lynn Arts.

John Crelan, the organizer of the Vineyard Bloomsday event which celebrates the day Joyce’s fictional Leopold Bloom embarked on his exploits in Dublin in Ulysses, said he first met Mr. O’Docherty in the 1970s when he was living in Cambridge. He described his old friend as a gifted storyteller.

“He was an amazing character and very original — these were not stories that someone else created. And he was a genius with a flute,” Mr. Crelan said.

Mr. O’Docherty’s Island friends included the late Travis Tuck, and Sophie and Bill Block, among others. “David made a lot of friends; he always kept in touch with people he had known his whole life,” his wife said.

In recent years when he visited the Vineyard, he would perform Irish music at the Windemere nursing home in Oak Bluffs.

He performed there last Thursday, the day after his performance at the Bloomsday event and two days before his death.

On Saturday morning Mr. O’Docherty went swimming at 10 a.m. in Katama Bay, near the house owned by friends on Edgartown Bay Road where he and his wife were staying. When he did not return from his swim, the police were called, at about 11:20 a.m. In addition to state police, the Edgartown harbor master, Edgartown police and state environmental police responded to the call, using boats from the Edgartown harbor master’s dock. Mr. O’Docherty was brought back to the harbor master’s dock at the end of Morse street, where he was pronounced dead by the coroner.

State police trooper David Parent said it appeared that Mr. O’Docherty, who had a heart attack five years ago, experienced some kind of medical event while he was swimming. An investigation by police is ongoing pending the results of an autopsy.

In addition to his wife, Gail Kuekan O’Docherty, Mr. O’Docherty is survived by two children from his first marriage, Annabel and Michael O’Docherty, who both live in England; and three grandchildren, also living in England.