Major key tunes – New Ealing Sessions

Kit White’s no. 2

Here’s Kit White’s no. 2, a tune I know from various sessions. I’ve had trouble tracking down who Kit White was or is – it’s not a good phrase to Google, though if you need a teeth whitening kit then I can tell you that have lots of options available, see also the drummer from the White Stripes and white football uniforms – and the Vaughn Williams Library archives (one of my ‘go to’ sources) doesn’t have any records of either the tune or the person. I have however found him listed as performing melodeon on a recording of traditional music from Yorkshire made in 1950, so that’s a start! My version differs slightly from some of the notated versions I’ve found, as so often happens in traditional music. Here’s the video, with a slow version, a faster version with variations and the chord rhythm:

Here are the dots for the standard version of the tune:

Kit White's no 2.png

The variations we tried involved switching the rhythms around in the A and B parts, and using the chord rhythm:

kw2 chord rhythm

The notation for the variations is here.

The Girl With the Blue Dress On

‘The Girl With the Blue Dress On’ is a chirpy polka that turns up in English and American traditions as a ceilidh tune, contra tune and as a North-West Morris tune.

the girl with the blue dress on

There is a simplified version here, and a more decorated version written out in full with the ‘tumbles’ (embellishments at the end of phrases that connect up the different sections) and the alternative chord sequence here.

The New Rigged Ship no. 1

Welcome back! Here’s the New Rigged Ship no. 1 in D major. I have found this tune in several sources, the earliest of which is an 1800 edition of Thomas Hardy’s manuscript (from Dorset), it also pops up in an 1853 Scottish book ‘Hamilton’s Universal Tune Book no.2’ and there’s an 1908 version collected in Derbyshire titled ‘The Man Who Couldn’t Get Warm’. There are both reels and jigs from the Shetland Isles called ‘Da New Rigged Ship’ or the ‘Da Full Rigged Ship’, however these do not seem to be related!

the new rigged ship in d

The warm ups and drills we started with are on a new page that you can find on the top menu – the main thing to note is that this tune contains lots of 3rds (that is to say a small jump of three notes), for instance in the D to F#s in the first two bars of the A section, and in bars 9 and 11 of the B section. This is a really handy interval to listen out for – think ‘cuckoo!’ – and it gives us lots of scope for variation!

We started by filling some of these 3rds in with the ‘missing’ notes (see HERE for a written variation).

We then took a load of notes out to create more space, before adding some slightly different patterns back in (see HERE for the written variation).

Please note that these variations are designed as a starting point, recapping some of the ideas we covered in class, and are not supposed to be a perfect examples although I have tried to make them at least reasonably musical! Other possibilities for melodic variation could include playing down the octave, or varying the order of the notes in repetitive sections, for instance in bars 3 and 4 of the A section.

French Tune

This is most likely La Marianne, though I have always known it as Madelaine, possibly a fancier version, or a mishearing, but anyway – here it is! PDF here, and video and dots below.

French Tune.png

Dark Girl Dressed in Blue

Here are the dots, PDF and video for the Dark Girl Dressed in Blue, also known as The Duchess (at least to me and Kerry Fletcher, can’t find it listed as this anywhere else!) and as Over the Waterfall in Old Time circles, albeit with the A and B sections reversed. There appears to be a song version of the tune dating back to about 1850, with lyrics by music hall star Harry Clifton (1824-1872), though recordings I can find are to a slightly different though seemingly related tune.