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They show the photo at 11:08 in the documentary. Before I'd only seen a pencil sketch of him, it looks much like the man in this picture. I checked and it doesn't look like NPU have included this in their journal. They pan up the photo so I couldn't show all of the set here, interestingly enough it is a Taylor. Gorman died in 1917 so he was one of the early adopters of concert pitch in Ireland. He was a wandering piper so it's perhaps surprising he could afford such an instrument.
Some factoids about Johnny I've picked up over the years: He played a lot with famous Sligo fiddlers Michael Coleman and James Morrison, and this piping influence can be heard in their music, Coleman especially played a lot of tight triplets; in the Sligo Maid you even hear him play ABA in the second octave, an ornament Patsy Touhey and his colleagues used off and on, ACA on the pipes of course and the reed would immediately drop an octave, but the pipers just carried on with the tune. One fellow talked about going into a room, Coleman was playing, and "You'd take your oath there was a piper in the room!"
Dublin piper Billy Andrews recorded a reel in the late 20s, "Johnny Gorman," this was a version of Sporting Nell but with a 2nd part more suited to the chanter. Sporting Nell is also called Gorman's.
In an interview in the Comhaltas archives with Andy Conroy talks about Gorman a bit; he also plays the Butcher's March, telling at the first how he met up with a piper in America who knew Gorman and could do a fair imitation of this tune as played by Johnny; this is pretty much as how Patsy Touhey recorded it on a cylinder, too, backstitching the back D in the first bar, and F#/G in the 4th, then substituting an ACA triplet for the usual plain A note in the 2nd part. Touhey also had a variant where instead of eAA fAA gAA fAA he would trill the notes in the 2nd octave.
Gorman could make reeds, despite being totally blind. He used a bit of broken glass for a scraper. He learned from a gentleman piper, Vizzard; a rumor was that he was a basmati child of the gentry. He lost his pipes at some point and was reduced to playing the fife and fiddle; he died by falling into a ditch, the body was only found afterwards, with its head separated from the body.
