Category: Minor key tunes

Johnny’s Gone To France

Here are the dots and video for Johnny’s Gone to France. There was some discussion over the origins of this tune on Monday as I, and many others, felt that that it sound pretty Irish! Further research shows that this tune is in The Fiddler’s Tune Book Vol. 2 by Peter Kennedy (1954), which covers tunes from all over the British Isles, it’s listed as on TuneArch.org as an English reel, and it’s also in Michael Raven’s English Country Dance Tunes book (1984). However! The version in the Raven book is slightly different to the version I know specifically at the end – I play both on the video – which makes it sound a lot less Irish. This makes me think that it is an English reel after all, of the type similar to tunes such as Wednesday Night, Dear Tobacco and Cuckold Come Out the Amery. I find the alternative titles/related tunes that have been suggested on various sites to be rather tenuous at best, so this is what we’re going with!

Johnny’s Gone to FranceDownload

For those of you that are interested, here is the Michael Raven’s version:

Peace and Plenty

Here is our new tune from 20th May, Peace and Plenty. It’s a tune from the 1718 edition of the Playford collection, I learned this from fantastic fiddle player Ben Potton, it is a little different than in that early manuscript, but only in the connecting/passing notes. It’s related to the Old Molly Oxford/Old Tom of Oxford Morris tune and we will potentially pair it with Old Meddon.

Here is the PDF:

peace-and-plentyDownload

The Mallard revisited

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.

the-mallard3Download

Mominette

Mominette by Maxou Heintzen might sound a little familiar if you know the tune The Plane Tree, which is a jigged version of this same tune that is attributed to whistle player and piper Undine Hornby. It is a potential mate for Will’s Way, with other contenders including Harlequin Air – as and when we decide (depending on whether it’s a simple arrangement for dancing to or a complex arrangement for concerts), we will add some alternative chords. Here is a fabulous recording of the tune by Blowzabella.

mominetteDownload