An English Morris tune for May Day, Old Meddon of Fawsley from the Longborough (Gloucestershire) tradition. I’ve not found any videos of this being danced, not sure why because it’s a fantastic tune! I think it’s related to Idbury Hill, given the similarities in the B part, but it definitely stands alone as a great tune. I found it in Chris Bartram’s English Fiddle book, which I would highly recommend.
Here are the videos and dots for Jigolo, a Welsh tune by Iolo Jones – we’ll be sticking with this one for a few weeks as well as returning to The Mallard and trying various things there too.
Try adding joining notes between A section repeats and B sections too, notes above or below the main notes work well, or a D of some description can also sound good.
The Mallard is a tune from a long time ago! I wanted to revisit it and to potentially pair it with Enfield Wash, though I found it a bit notey and so wanted to simplify it a little.
Stage one: we took out as many notes as we could until we had the bare skeleton of the tune – but it still had to be recognisable as the tune.
Stage two: we add notes back in, either from the original tune or using similar figures.
Stage three: as we tried things out, I wrote down some of the ideas that came out. The two versions below represent some of the ideas that came out during that experimentation. They are not supposed to be definitive versions but rather examples of what can happen if you play around with a tune in this way.
Here’s Broad Hoops, as tune from Lancashire that appears in the John Winder collection of 1835-41. Anyone interested in this, or indeed any other folk tune collections from England should check out the village-music-project.org.uk
Here is Sawney Dear, a country dance tune from Lancashire (tune, riff and rhythm).
Here are the dots, with a PDF download underneath:
An instrumental version of the Irish song, the Lark in the Clear Air, with low harmony.
Here’s the video of just the tune:
And finally, the tune with the chords:
We took our recent tunes, The Great North Run and Ger the Rigger, and tried swinging the rhythm to give them more of a hornpipe feel. I’ve come across both tunes played this way, so it really is a case of two for the price of one!
The Great North Run by Robert Whitehead, a fabulous tune to potentially go with Ger the Rigger.
A cheerful tune to start our term, Irish polka Ger the Rigger. This tune appears in the 1976 book Ceol Rince na hÉireann vol. 2. Here are the basic dots, with an additional ornamented/varied version:
Here is the tune and harmony:
Here’s a slow and a faster version, with the riff at the end:
Here is the riff we tried (this will be developed next week!):
Finally here’s a fantastic version of the tune, it has more of a swing to it and a really lovely groove.
New Ealing Sessions 