Something that’s got me scratching my head: in Jerry O’Sullivan’s latest CD, the wonderful O’Sullivan Meets O’Farrell, the tunes of track 6, “Quick-Step/Willy Winky”, are listed as polkas, which they certainly are for our purposes. Now, these tunes were published in the 18th century, whereas the polka per se is commonly considered to have arisen in continental Europe just prior to the mid-19th century.
My question is this: since it’s apparent that what in the Tradition gets called a polka has already been around and is older than than popular wisdom suggests, did “polkas” go by another term back in the day? There must certainly have been more of them being played than just those two examples on O’Sullivan’s CD.
I don’t own a copy of any of O’Farrell’s work, so I’m left with wondering about it. Could it be it’s time to reclaim the polka, baptise it anew, and elevate it from its “foreign” status? (Well, there’s no necessary reason to change the name, of course, but ya gotta wonder.)
My mostly uninformed instinct is that it’s the other way around – convenient 2/4 tunes got drafted to be polkas when the dance arrived to Ireland.
For instance, “The Ballymote Polka” on the Peter Horan/Fred Finn album is actually an old Scottish song melody, “My Love is But a Lassie Yet”. (In 4/4 actually, but then, it’s a Sligo polka, not a Kerry polka.)
Still, there’s the “Quick-Step” of O’Farrell’s. Still 18th century, that, unless “quick-step” in this case was just nothing more than a descriptive title…
Polkas are generally in 2/4 (sometimes 2/2), marches can be in 2/4 (in addition to 4/4 and 2/2 and even, heaven help us all, 6/8 (subdivided into 2 – c.f. Sousa’s Washington Post March)) – my understanding is that it’s not necessarily the beat but how you ‘dance’ to it.
I’ve come across marches that appear to draw from a variety of meters, not having seen most of the ones I know written out. The Eagle’s Whistle, for example, is for all the world to me a mazurka even though it can be written in 2/4 time (check out the Fiddler’s Companion on that one) as well as in the more familiar 3/4. Don’t think the mazurka was even a glint in its daddy’s eye when that march came about.
Maybe I’ll start calling polkas “quicksteps” and see if it catches on.
What about Galician Carbellsas which are also quick 2/4 tunes. How about Pasadobles, I know a Galician Polka (yep they play Polkas in Galician, but call them Polcas) called Pasadoble De Posada.
At the 2006 Seattle tionol, Denis Brooks was saying that some of the clan marches turned into jigs over the years; polkas could have a common march ancestor as well.
