Author: debfiddle

Deborah is a violinist and violist specialising in English folk music. She trained in viola and Baroque viola at Birmingham Conservatoire, before returning to her first love of traditional music, song and dance. She is a member of Stepling, a band performing English music, step-dance, song and percussion. She also plays for a number of function bands, performing at barn dances and ceilidhs across the UK. Deborah has played with a number of folk artists, dance and theatre projects. She played for a number of years with Folk Dance Remixed, a dance company combining traditional dance with hip hop and street dance styles, and performing as such events as Car Fest, the Southbank's Festival of Love and Glasgow's Commonwealth Games Festival. She records on a regular basis for a number of people, including The Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra, and for Laurel Swift's 'Travelling with Thomas' musical. Deborah teaches music, song and dance regularly for The English Folk Dance and Song Society, as well as on a freelance basis for various workshop series, festivals and music services. She is currently studying on The Teaching Musician MA degree course at Trinity Laban.

The Bonnie Pit Laddie

Here’s the video of The Bonny Pit Laddie, a song/tune from Northumbria, printed in the 1882 Northumbrian Minstrelsy, with earlier versions printed elsewhere in 1812 and 1770.

The Bonnie Pit Laddie.png

 

Click here for the dots in PDF form.

 

In the version I know, each line is sung twice, meaning that you’ll get through the tune twice, but in others I’ve found the second and fourth lines are follow one another making up one B section:

The bonnie pit laddie, the canny pit laddie, the bonnie pit laddie for me, oh (x 2)

He sits in a hole as black as the coal and brings the bright silver for me, oh (x 2)

 

The bonnie pit laddie, the canny pit laddie, the bonnie pit laddie for me, oh (x 2)

He sits on his cracket & hews in his jacket & brings the bright silver for me, oh (x 2)

 

The pit in question would have been a coal mine, and the ‘bright silver’ refers to money earned.  For those of you in education, or for anyone who wants to know more about mining songs, there is a great digital info pack available from the EFDSS website here.

 

Small Coals and Little Money

Here’s Small Coals and Little Money, a tune from the 1882 Northumbrian Minstrelsy manuscript.  The A and B parts are almost identical so we created variation by varying the chord patterns and rhythms, taking out some notes in the melody, and trying out ornamentation.

 

Here are the dots:

 

Small Coals and Little Money

For the PDF, click here.

In the chord part, we used a ‘chugging’ rhythm for the A part, and then a more relaxed rhythm in the B part.

 

Melody instruments created a groove for the A part by switching between A minor and G major notes (click here for the chart, the beats are minim beats, so 2 slow beats per bar).

Geraint has kindly passed on the link to his own recording of our end of night play-through, for some folk class realness: https://soundcloud.com/ger-evans/small-coals-and-little-money/s-olvae

The Beggar Boy

Here’s the video for Playford tune The Beggar Boy, from the 1651 manuscript – it was included in subsequent editions right through to the 7th in 1686, and Chappell (1859) notes that there are several ballads written to the tune, as tended to happen with popular tunes.

 

 

And here are the dots:

The Beggar Boy.png

Here are the dots in PDF form, for those who want to print them out.

We created contrast between sections with drone-like minor chords in the A section and swifter changing major chords in the B section.  I’ve tagged the tune as both major and minor as it can be harmonised as either, giving a different character.

We created a groove for the A section by picking out notes from the D minor and C major triads.  Since Dm and C are neighbours, it’s possible to move between the chords in a scale pattern.  Here’s a link to a chart explaining this: for each of the main beats listed at the top, pick a note from the coloumn beneath. There is an example of how you could do this at the bottom, with notes highlighted in red.  You might want to print this sheet out and circle one note in each column to create your own part.

 

Schottische a Virmoux

Here is the video for Monday’s tune, Schottische a Virmoux (also listed as ‘Schottische Virmoux’ and ‘Schottische de Virmoux’) by Frederic Paris.

 

Our variations were pushing the G chord in the second bar, and tying the A over the bar line (there’s a version with these written in here.)

Here are the dots:

Schottische Virmoux.png

If you want to download or print this out, click here.

As promised, here’s a video with the strumming pattern for the chord players:

 

 

Serpentiner och Konfetti

Serpentiner och Konfetti (Streamers and Confetti) is a fantastic reijländer tune by Swedish melodeon player Mats Edén.  We’re not trying to play it in a particularly Swedish way, also I somehow only played the B section once on the video – apologies, it had been a long day!

 

Here are the dots for the tune:

Serpentiner och Konfetti.png

We varied the rhythm by anticipating (or ‘pushing’) some of the main beats in the melody and also in the chord sequence – dots can be found here.