Tag Archives: Yorkshire

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Huntsman’s Chorus / Old John Peel

This weekend I’m off to the market town of Masham, North Yorkshire, which this year hosts the annual English Country Music Weekend. So to get me in the mood, here’s a couple of North country dance tunes.

I feel like I’ve known ‘The Huntsman’s Chorus’ forever. I wonder if perhaps the Oyster Ceilidh Band used to play it, back in the late seventies, when I first started going to dances. I also feel like I’ve always known of the connection with the Yorkshire Dales, in particular with the Beresford family (although exactly how I would have known that, I’m not sure), and that the tune started life in Weber’s opera Der Freischütz – despite the fact that I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard Der Freischütz, and indeed I don’t think I’m familiar with any of Weber’s work. The Traditional Tune Archive tells us that it is in fact just the first half of the dance tune which can be found in the opera – in a choral piece called ‘Was glecht wohl auf Erden’, which opens the third act. You can hear it on YouTube.

Der Freischütz was first performed in Berlin in 1821, but a version of ‘The Huntsman’s Chorus’ had soon made its way into the music manuscript book (dated 1823) of Joshua Gibbons from Tealby, Lincolnshire – albeit with the title ‘Election Tune, June 1826’.

Clearly the tune entered the country dance repertoire at some point – in the Yorkshire Dales at any rate. Peter Kennedy recorded the tune in 1954, played by fiddle-player Peter Beresford and accordionist George Beresford, at Oughtershaw in Langstrothdale, and it was published, along with an associated dance, in English Dance & Song, February 1965, Volume XXVII No. 2. A copy of the relevant page can be found on the Contrafusion website.

For more information about this tune, the musical Beresford family,  the tunes they played, and a great deal more, check out Bob Ellis’ compendious collection of Yorkshire dance tunes There Was None of this Lazy Dancing.

 

‘The Old John Peel’ is from Cumberland, as far as I know. It was very much part of the repertoire at the English sessions in Eynsham in the late 80s having originally been introduced, I imagine, by Dave Townsend.

We recorded it on the second Geckoes album Art Gecko, and then Ian Anderson featured it on a Folk Roots covermount CD (we were “brand leaders” as I recall). It was as a result of this that I had my one and only play by the great John Peel who, amused by the tune title, featured it on his late night World Service radio show.

 

Huntsman’s Chorus / Old John Peel

Played on a Hohner four-stop one-row melodeon in C

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Billy Harrison’s Father’s Polka

A tune from East Yorkshire fiddle-player Billy Harrison, who was recorded by Jim Eldon in the 1980s, playing both dance tunes and local carol settings, on fiddle and cello. Jim’s recordings were made available by Musical Traditions as Yorkshire Fiddle Tunes, Songs and Carols – originally released on cassette in 1987, now available as a download for just a quid from www.mtrecords.co.uk.

Jim Eldon also wrote an article for Musical Traditions about Billy’s life – Billy Harrison: Yorkshire Wolds Fiddler.

About ‘Father’s Polka’ he says simply “I haven’t yet found anyone who knows this tune from another source”. But I assume that Billy called it ‘Father’s Polka’ because he’d learned it from his father, like Billy and his brother Bob, a violin-player.

Billy Harrison c1929, from Musical Traditions.

Billy Harrison c1929, from Musical Traditions.

Billy Harrison’s Father’s Polka

Played on G/D anglo-concertina

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Greensleeves / Money in both pockets / The Divil in Ireland

Three jigs from the 1798 manuscript of North Yorkshire miller Joshua Jackson. Jackson’s tunes have been published in two volumes by Geoff & Liz Bowen and Robin & Rosalind Shepherd. You can buy them from the Yorkshire Dales Workshop website – almost 500 tunes in all.

These tunes all come from Volume 1.

Greensleeves

G/D anglo-concertina

Had this been listed as “Untitled Jig” I doubt that I would have spotted that it’s part of the very wide, and very diverse family of Greensleeves tunes.

Money in both pockets

G/D anglo-concertina

This tune turns up in English, Scottish, Irish and North American sources. Neil Gow published a version in 1792, and it was in Preston’s Twenty Four Country Dances for the Year 1793.
See the Traditional Tune Archive for more.

The Divil in Ireland

C/G anglo-concertina

This seems to be better known as ‘Get Up Old Woman And Shake Yourself’ or ‘Go to the Devil and Shake Yourself’ (although there’s a completely different tune which I associate with that title).