A Tune A Week

I used to know this tune years ago. I learned it from a Micho Russell book called “The Piper’s Chair,” which has little tidbits of folklore and such in amongst the music. I worked it up properly today, because I heard it at a session last night and couldn’t quite play along. And a certain Elizabeth Crotty disc has just moved up on my list because I notice it contains this tune played on the concertina—it’s fun to compare the versions I work out with the versions other concertina players do.

The two groups I have played with in Nashville play this one two different ways, as I discovered when I picked this up at McGuinness and took it to Sherlock Holmes. The version I’m playing here has fewer contiguous notes on the push in the first part. When I play the other one, I tend to run out of air.

Here’s a nice tune to mark the quarter-century. I learned the first three parts of this from a Geraldine Cotter whistle tutor CD (don’t waste your money on that one) and the fourth part from Sharon Shannon’s Out the Gap. The first part was really hard until I learned to cross my third finger under my second to get the B on the left side. All the notes of the ascending arpeggiated bit in the fourth part are available on the push, but I am stubbornly refusing to abandon my base scale to play them that way.

No tune for this week, because I was in Miami at a conference. Yes, I changed some dates on some of the entries post facto - what’s new?

Got this one by ear, the large part of it at McGuinness’s and the last bits at a slow jam. It’s labeled a hornpipe at the Virtual Session, (followed by Soldier’s Joy, yclept same!) but I don’t think I’ll be following their lead on that one.