July 2020 – New Ealing Sessions

Walter Bulwer’s Polka no. 2

Walter Bulwer was a fiddle player from Shipham in Norfolk. Born in 1888, he was a well known musician in the area, playing for many years in bands with his wife Daisy who played piano and banjo.

Here is a link to a recording of Walter Bulwer himself playing this tune: https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/4oAC9779ZNFrjaWKAWNIqW There is a third part that he adds in occasionally but I haven’t covered that here, as it isn’t commonly played in sessions or at dances.

Here is a video with a slow and faster playthrough:

Here’s a walk through of the tune:

We played with the phrase at the beginning of the B section (bars 9 and 10), varying the rhythm: this included tying repeated notes together, dividing the rhythm into equal notes and subdividing the notes into shorter note values. We then combined these in different ways to create different rhythmic variations – this is a relatively simple but effective way of adding a little variation into your playing!

Here’s a PDF of the tune:

wbp2 Download

And another with the chords:

walter-bulwers-chords Download

The (Other) Rogue’s March

The penultimate tune of the term is a tune that I learned from Laurel Swift. It’s listed in Dave Townsend’s English Dance Music vol. 1 as the C and D parts of the better known Rogue’s March, as sung here by John Tams and Barry Coope:

This well known tune dates back to the late 1700s, and is said to have been used across the British Isles and America to drum disgraced soldiers out of the army. However, I’ve not been able to find any reference to the C and D parts of the tune, so it’s a bit of a mystery!

Here is a slower and faster version of the tune. The faster part includes the turns that we added throughout the tune wherever a step-wise crotchet-quaver pattern occurs on the first beat of a bar.

Here is a walkthrough:

Here are the dots:

A PDF with the dots can be downloaded below, along with a second PDF with standard and alternative chords:

other-rogue Download

other-rogues-march-chords Download

The Sheriff’s Ride

Here is the tune from Monday 29th June, the Sheriff’s Ride.

The Sheriff’s Ride is an English tune used in the Lichfield Morris tradition, in Staffordshire. The title refers to a unique tradition dating from Queen Mary’s Charter of 1553 in which Lichfield was separated from Staffordshire and made a ‘City and County’ with a right to appoint its own Sheriff. The Charter commanded the Sheriff to make a complete perambulation of the City to inspect the boundary each September. The oldest recorded collection of the tune as played for the Morris dance is from 1898 (Bacon, ‘A Handbook of Morris Dances’, The Morris Ring 1974) though it is probably older than this, most likely dating back to the mid-1800s, when polka-type tunes originated.

The Sheriff’s Ride shares parts of its melody with some versions of the song Raggle Taggle Gypsies, a song that became particularly popular in the broadsides in the early- to mid-1800s, telling the tale of a rich lady who runs away to join a group of gypsies.

The first video is a slow and a faster version of the tune, the second is a walkthrough: