A Tune A Week

In between Denis Murphy’s and John Ryan’s on a Planxty record. It sounds terrific on the bouzouki. I haven’t quite made up my mind about how it sounds on the squeezebox, but I was getting tired of those other two and this one rejuvenates them nicely.

A nice fellow for the Tournmore, with some equally odd key changes in it. Tune two of a Johnny O’Leary track.

Not the same as my very first post, but strangely similar in parts, considering it’s a completely different tune. Despite what is claimed at The Session, this tune is not on my Jackie Daly CD - that’s the other one. The very best record-keeping is always to be found at Alan Ng’s.

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.

Not quite the same version of this polka as they have posted over at The Session, but I swear I’ve heard it this way somewhere. Maybe in the same set as Denis Murphy’s at the last McGuinness session. Or in a different set. Or something.

Yes, yes, I got a little behind for a while there. This polka is one I used to know five years ago, and forgot. When I heard it at the session the other week, I decided to go get it in my head again. The possibility of playing a tune with other people is a big motivator.

I’ve been out of town, traveling and partying for the holidays, not to mention catching the HEINOUS FLU. So for this week I got lazy and dug an old polka out of the depths of my head to work it up using different fingering. When I originally learned this tune on the box, I was going for a minimum of bellows changes; this time, I went for bounce. This one can be found on Patrick Street’s “Made in Cork,” which I borrowed from my roommate in college many years ago. I don’t have it any more, but I don’t think I gave it back to him, either. Whoops.

A polka off of Jackie Daly’s recording “Traditional Accordion and Concertina Music from Sliabh Luachra,” from Ossian. This is the first tune on track 9, evidently also known as The Tournmore. I learned it because I already knew the other tunes on the track and wanted to be able to play along all the way through. It’s not the other polka called Jim Keeffe’s on track 1, nor the slide called Keeffe’s on track 2!