Category: Major key tunes

Belated Happy Burns Night! Here is a tune from Scotland called the White Cockade. It doesn’t follow the predictable pattern of some of the tunes we learned, so we sang through the A part (verse) using the Robbie Burns poem The Jolly Beggar’s John Highwayman:

A Highland lad my love was born,
The Lalland laws he held in scorn;
But he still was faithfu’ to his clan,
My gallant, braw John Highlandman.

Sing hey my braw John Highlandman!
Sing ho my braw John Highlandman!
There’s not a lad in a’ the lan’
Was match for my John Highlandman.  etc etc
https://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertburns/works/the_jolly_beggars_john_highlandman/

Here are the Jacobite words, famously recorded in the 1970s by The Corries:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Scottish_Song/The_White_Cockade

We also tried some upper and lower cuts (ornaments) and tried a slightly different set of chords,

Here is our tune from the end of the Autumn term, Wolves a-Howlin’, aka Poor Little Darling. It’s a tune that’s spread widely among Deep South and MidWestern fiddlers, with a various versions of the tune present in various different places. I’ve chucked an E chord in here and there for variety but you can here in the first video that the chords are fairly stable and unchanging – this is not uncommon in Old Time and Bluegrass music.

Here’s another version of the tune on mandolin – you can here where it’s the same and where it’s different. Many thanks to David for sending these videos over, both are excellent finds!

A tune from Norfolk, the Swanton Abbot Hornpipe (originally just called Hornpipe) collected by George Watson in the late 1800s. There is a nice write up on the Village Music Project website about the Watson collection, for anyone who’s interested.

You’ll notice that the chords don’t resolve the D at the end of each section – this is on purpose! We often think of a 32 bar tune as being just that but in reality the tune will be played four or five times in a row, and so the constant return to the tonic key at the end of each section can become somewhat tedious. While we won’t use the G chords every time, this serves as a reminder to think of the whole arc of the repeated tune and not just the short, written down tune that we see in the notation.

Here’s a fantastic version of the tune by Nick Wyke and Becki Driscoll

https://nickwykeandbeckidriscoll.bandcamp.com/track/george-watsons-hornpipe

And a very different version by Dave Shepherd:

UPDATE:

Here’s a PDF of the accompaniment pattern, with its stereo effect:

and a video of the accompaniment alone (beginning) and with the tune (from 1:46) – my phone hasn’t picked up the pattern very well, but you can hear it in places.

A cheerful tune to start back, this is Lucky Scaup, or Lucky Scaupie, a Scottish tune that I got from a Jimmy Shand album.

I believe that Lucky Scaup refers to an old Folly in Tayport, near Dundee. It was built in the 1860s and demolished in the 1979 when it had become unstable and potentially dangerous.

The structure is AAB, as the B section is long and references the A at the end. The D/F# chords (and others in this format) mean play a D chord with an F# in the bass if possible.

Here is the recording I learned it from, our tune starts at 1:08.