St. Patrick’s Show to Turn Into Tribute : Concert: The Orange County Folk Music Society and Paddy West will honor trio’s founder, Patrick Kennedy, who died in December.

Orange County’s popular Irish folk group Paddy West will give its annual St. Patrick’s Day concert at Orange Coast College on Saturday, but this year’s affair will be a bittersweet celebration.

In December, the group’s founder, Irish-born singer and songwriter Patrick Kennedy, died in his sleep at age 45, apparently of heart failure.

The group’s remaining members, Jessie Kelly and George Kavanaugh, will perform as a tribute to Kennedy. The pair will be joined by seven members of the Orange County Folk Music Society, of which Kennedy was a member.

Paddy West, whose name derives from the title of an Irish folk song, has played around the Southland for years in all seasons but was predictably in greatest demand each March, when all Americans seem to turn a wee bit Irish.

But Kennedy never let the day’s reputation for lush pseudo-sentimentality overpower his respect for the music of his homeland, which he left in 1975 to settle in the United States.

In a 1987 Times interview, Kennedy told how he deftly fended off requests for such St. Patrick’s Day tear-jerkers as “Danny Boy” and “Mother Machree”: “I tell people, ‘I don’t know that song well enough to play it right. But I’ll tell you what--I’ll play another song that I know you will like.’ ”

He preferred to play his own songs and, especially, the Emerald Isle’s traditional jigs and reels--what he called “the real stuff. I’m playing what I would be playing in Ireland.”

Kennedy worked by day as a structural engineer and kept his music as a serious hobby, rather than as a profession.

In addition to its college appearances, the trio, whose membership has varied over the years except for Kennedy, had been a favorite at local bars. But Kennedy expressed little interest in trying to strike commercial gold:

“I have nothing against the commercial music. I like a lot of it. I just can’t perform it myself and feel at home with it.”

Paddy West will perform Saturday at 8 p.m. in Fine Arts Recital Hall at Orange Coast College, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $6.50 advance, $8 at the door. Information: (714) 432-5880.