Last night was the last in the series of Scotland’s Music with Phil Cunningham. The series has been looking at music (not just trad) in Scotland and how it developed and how it affects our lives.
For the last episode he wanted to see how it had spread over the world so he went to places like Cape Breton, Oman, Ireland and America.
Basically over the course of the program it was revealed in discussion with noted musicians in those locations that the traditional music from Ireland, Canada and America (bluegrass/country) all derived from Scotland.
The Canadian Cape Breton stuff is obvious, but I found the other 2 quite interesting.
Now I knew there was a lot of cross pollination between Ireland and Scotland musically but the muscians on the show said that Ireland actually borrowed a lot more from us than we took from them. They said jigs and reels, which I had always thought of as a mutual thing were originally Scottish.
The American thing as well is more obvious, with mostly Scots and Scots-Irish settling in the Appalachian mountains (where the programme focussed on) and then from there having large influence on Memphis and Nashville close by. They also talked about New York and Carnegie Hall.
So having watched it and accepted it I now propose we rename this forum the Scottish Traditional Music Forum
I believe it’s fairly generally accepted that reels came over to Ireland by way of Scotland… Initially.
Jigs… I’d say not likely. Jigs are more likely to have originated on the mainland, but could also have come from clan marches (and hence played on the big pipes, but that doesn’t mean scottish!), or some other place, or oculd have sprung full grown from the ground somewhere in County Clare.
The oldest publication that I know for irish music is the O’Farrell collection. Lots of jigs, slip jigs etc in there and almost all are irish (or at least unlabelled as being “scotch”.) There are a couple tunes in 4/4 including reels (at least one anyway) and strathspeys that are marked as “scotch”. At the time, I guess scotch was used for scottish… It’s not my terminology anyway.
There are some in 2/4 too, and at least 1 that I looked at the felt a lot like a polka. Waltzes are present too, as well as minuets, carolan tunes, pieces, and songs.
There’ve been interesting points from Kevin Reitmann about american music and irish/scottish music and how far back the split must have occurred.
Can you point us to any of those comments, Nico? Or is it just a matter of searching the board? It’s a topic I’m particularly interested in.
I know the surge of border Scots and Ulster Scots to the colonies came relatively late - early to mid 1700s - after the southern tidewater and northern coastal settlements were already well-established. The Scottish newcomers were not welcomed by English and German colonists, and forced west to the less arable and desirable Appalachian highlands, where their existing music tradition could develop in relative isolation. And at that point the tradition must already have been heavily fiddle-dominant at the source among the immigrant classes, with winds and other string instruments playing little role.
No, unfortunately, I can’t say I can… I wouldn’t know which keywords to put in, and I’d have to search myself anyway.
I believe it’s in this forum, but it might be in another one…
It’s also possible that it’s in the uilleann pipe or whistle forum, but I don’t remember.
Maybe Kevin would come back and say?
If I recall, he mentioned how he searched the titles of old time recordings and found very few tunes in common. Or something like that. Anyway, there are much fewer tunes in the common repetoire of old time / appalachian, ontario style, etc and irish / scottish etc than was being touted on these forums. Or at least, that was the gist of it I think.
That’s interesting. Though I’d think that titles per se are a poor marker of identity. Even within one tradition, a tune title can vary wildly, even if the underlying tune is the same. Titles naturally tend to reflect the local environment and culture. Names like “Flop-Eared Mule” or “Possum on a Rail” sound very American, but there may be identifiable British or Irish sources.
Anyway, thanks! I’ll search around or ask Kevin directly.
This has come up numerous times in the past on the piping board, but since there are many here who would hold you to only being permitted to present any information that is of the highest and strictest of academic standards, these discussions quickly died. These are not, after all, academic institutions. You can do a search using “and” in your string for multiple keys.
As I recall, jigs come from the Italian “gigga”, as did the instrument, also called “gigga”, which would later become known as the “violin” or “fiddle”.
I once read somewhere (the reference is lost, now, to the mists of time) that the slip jig is original to the Irish, and that they probably had other forms of music as well, but that these were not recorded. Just because things were written down first in Scotland, the Scots are quick to claim that most things originated there. The Irish, after conquest, seem to have been reticent to record many things about themselves, and the little that is known seems indicate that they were keen to pick up any new music fad that may have been sweeping through Europe. Does that mean they abandoned all their former music styles? Who can say, when the Irish didn’t write anything down?
As I recall, jigs come from the Italian “gigga”, as did the instrument, also called “gigga”, which would later become known as the “violin” or “fiddle”.
And in German it’s still called the Geige!
Though to play devil’s advocate, names can get shifted around too. A swedish polska’s not terribly like an Irish polka, which is a bit but not hugely like a German polka… so who knows.
Like the jig originating in Italy and then sweeping Europe in its popularity, the polka originated in (where else?) Poland, and took Europe by storm. Considering the lack of our modern media, these dance and music trends seem to have been passed on to all levels of society at an appreciable speed - a dance craze. Nothing is new under the sun, they say.
There’s a gem of a recording, from an old West Virginia fiddler named Eddin Hammons, recorded in the 1940’s when Eddin was rather old. His grandfather was the first white settler in the area, and his people have been fiddlers from the get-go. The Hammons family preserved many archaic tunes.
The first thing that struck me when I heard Eddin’s playing for the first time was how little it sounded like “old-timey” music. Rather, it sounded more like Shetland fiddling in many ways. I had long thought that Shetland fiddling represented the “missing link” between British/Irish fiddling and Appalachian fiddling, but now it was more clear than ever.
About titles, Eddin plays a wonderful tune he calls “The Child of the Earth and The Daughter of the Skies” (or something like that) which is obviously the set-dance The Blackbird. So, as you say, titles don’t tell you much. The Appalachian song “Hop High Ladies” is obviously the tune the Irish call “McLeod’s Reel” and the Scots call “Mrs MacLeod of Raasay”.
Anyone interested in reading about a genuine American traditional music, the music of Appalachia, should read:
Mountains Of Music edited by John Lilly
Play of a Fiddle: Traditional Music, Dance, and Folklore in West Virginia by Gerald Milnes (who is a fine West Virginia-style fiddler himself)
