Folk workshops in West London
Here are the video and dots for An Blew Treghy, with huge thanks to Beth Gifford for covering the class. An Blew Treghys is a Cornish Tune which Beth learned from the singing of Aimee Leonard and recorded by Aimee’s band Anam on their album Riptide.
The dots can be found as a PDF file here.
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:
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
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:
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 (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:
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.
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:
The variations we tried involved switching the rhythms around in the A and B parts, and using the chord rhythm:
The notation for the variations is here.
‘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.
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.
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.
