This jig has been going through my head. I think that this is a pretty close rendition of the A and the beginning of the B part: anybody got a name for it?
|d| dAd dAd | cBA F2 d | dAd FGA |
GFE D2 d |
dAd dAd | cBA F2 d | dAd FGA |
GFE F3| G3 A3 |def F3 |G3 F2 A| GED
Thanks lots,
Jon Michaels
The Rolling Wave. There are at least two tunes with this name. The Chieftains put this on Chieftains 8, and I think it came from Willie Clancy’s dad.
Sorry it’s me again!
Thanks very much, Stevie. I actually know that tune (I always think of it by its other name, The Humours of Trim to keep it clear of the OTHER Rolling Waves), but I was thrown off because the version I heard uses the B part as its A part and has a different B altogether.
Jon, ever since you asked about this tune I’ve had it on the brain. I stirred myself finally to fit that new stylus onto the trusty old turntable and dug out the LP “The Pipering of Willie Clancy”, Vol. 1". Here’s what Séamus Ennis’ says about the tune in the sleeve notes:
The Rolling Wave. It seems that Willie called this a slip jig (9/8 time) as a compromise, because its time-signature changes from 6/8 to 9/8 and to 3/8 unpredictably and it has me baffled too. One thing I am sure of, though: this is exactly how his father played it, for Willie was a purist in the sense that he held the old people’s tunes sacrosanct, especially those of his father.
Whatever the time-signature, Willie Clancy makes a lovely job of the tune! He definitely starts it with the low part, BTW.
But Ennis’ remarks got me wondering. So, to JC’s ABC tune finder:
JC’s search engine turned up several matches for this tune and the other one (the one recorded by Kevin Burke on “Portland”), but all the instances of this one were Henrik Norbek’s transcription (hn-jig-247) reproduced below. At first sight there seem to be no problems with HN’s fitting the tune into a straight 6/8 structure - no extra beats or anything.
But… there’s something funny about the accents. Especially the first bars of the first and second part, which definitely sound slip-jiggy to my ear. So I have played around with the time-signatures mentioned by Ennis and come up with this version. What does anyone think - have I got it right?
I know this all very academic and possibly irrelevant - learn the tune by ear and these problems might never occur to you. But if you learned it from the 6/8 version without every having heard it, would it sound right? And Ennis knew what he was talking about!
I haven’t used the abc/abc tag pair because concertina.net was bugging out on something in my abc code, so here’s a GIF instead:
X:1
T:Rolling Wave, The (slip jig?)
M:9/8
L:1/8
R:jig
Z:“Brother Steve” Jones
N:An attempt to reproduce the accents correctly with mixed time-signatures
K:D
FEF DED D2d |M:3/8 L:1/8 cAG |M:9/8 F3 DED A2 F |M:3/8 L:1/8 GFE |!
M:9/8 F3 DED D2d |M:3/8 L:1/8 cAG | M:6/8 FAF GBG|[1 A2 F GFE 
[2 M:9/8 A2 F GFE D2d || !
: cAd cAd cAG|M:6/8 F2d cAG| M:9/8 FAF GFE D2d |
cAd fed cAG|M:6/8 FAF GBG|[1 M:9/8 A2 F GFE D2 d:|[2 M:6/8 A2 F GFE ||
This is Henrik Norbek’s transcription (minus his 2nd part variations):
X:247
T:Humours of Trim, The
T:Rolling Wave, The
R:jig
Z:id:hn-jig-247
M:6/8
K:D
FEF DED|D2d cAG|~F3 DED|A2F GFE|
~F3 DED|D2d cAG|FAF GBG|AFA GFE:|
D2d cAd|cAd cAG|F2d cAG|FAF GFE|
D2d cAd|fed cAG|FAF GBG|AFA GFE :||
[ This Message was edited by: StevieJ on 2002-03-21 12:11 ]
[ This Message was edited by: StevieJ on 2002-03-21 12:12 ]
Wow! That looks fun!
I’ll have to learn it as soon as I get home.
Just put on the Chieftains “Sea image” set from Chieftains 8. Interestingly, they play two distinct versions, first a straight 6/8 version, with loads of note groups missing, and later something closer to the above version.
E.g. first two bars of first version played by Sean Keane:
FEF D2d | cAG FEF | …
Steve, some years ago I played the tune with Caiominh O’ Raghallaigh [for those who don’t know him, Caiominh is a young fiddler playing lovely music in the style of Padraig O Keeffe, one of these kids who do a masters in nuclear physics and complain about the lack of intellectual challenge]. Anyway, it was a bit of an end of the Willie week session, the two of us in a backroom and a few of his [female ofcourse] students gazing on. There was also an interesting incident with an American girl refusing to tune down to C but still attempting to play with us. Very sensitive to criticism she was, had there been a door, she would have slammed it when she left.
To cut to the chase, always a stickler for detail, he made a point about Willie’s version of the tune and the importance of how Willie played the second phrase of the second part as
D cAc ded cAG FAF A2F GFE D2
A few other odd notes were mentioned too, he had a point and there’s no harm listening again to Willie playing it while paying attention to those little, important, details.
Same applies by the way to a few quirky things in versions of tunes like Jimmy Ward’s and The Battering Ram both of which are circulating in ironed-out modernised versions but retain these little things in versions played by older players in West Clare. Often these things are there for a reason.
[ This Message was edited by: Peter Laban on 2002-03-22 05:49 ]