Ok, perhaps a silly question, yet I will ask nonetheless. I have no fear of being silly.
I (like many of us I assume) have music books, CDs, and other goodies. You know the ones, “100 most Stupefyingly Stupendous Irish Session Tunes.”
Well, I don’t have time to learn 100 tunes this week. So here’s the setup - and the question:
I show up and watch the session you hang with a couple times, then politely ask, “What are the top 6 session friendly tunes - not too challenging - that I should start practicing, and should I gain proficiency join in with y’all one day? Like, something everyone enjoys playing that a mediocre player can practice well, then join in and not be a buzzkill.”
Of course I assume there will be differences from one area to another, and from one session to another. But with enough answers I can do some stats and see if there’s some consensus.
It’s much better to ask this at the session you’re going to play at than on a general board - I’ve played in sessions in several cities, and their common tunes all varied. Same with sessions in my own city.
Here’s a few common ones from my perspective which may be different than anyone elses:
Reels - Silver Spear, Maid Behind the Bar, Wind that Shakes the Barley, The Banshee
Jigs - Willie Colemons, Ships in Full Sail (could be Ships are Sailing - one is a jig the other a reel and I mix them up), Morrisons, Donnybrook Fair
Hornpipes - Boys of Bluehill, Home Ruler, Off to California, Harvest Home, Rights of Man
Polkas - Sean Ryans, Ballydesmond 1 & 2 (at least that’s how we number them in KC), O’Sullivans/Mickey Chewing Bubblegum, Britches Full of Stitches
Slipjigs - The Butterfly, Drops of Brandy, Kid on the Mountain
I know that’s more than 6, but six of any of those will get you going.
Is “Ryan’s Jig” a slipjig, or is it a Sean Ryan jig or what? I’ve never heard of a jig called just “Ryan’s”, and thesession.org isn’t helping much. There is a nice “Sean Ryan’s” which is pretty common and a nice tune, but the first part spends a good bit of time beneath a D whistle’s range.
The problem with making a list like this is three of the tunes Mitch names will get you branded as a clueless noob at our session, and one of the remaining ones about half of the locals don’t know.
I’ll try to play along – while I’m sure there are sessions out there where these are not known, here are six good solid session tunes which are pretty reasonable on whistle, and probably won’t make experienced players roll their eyes too much if you start them. But I’m sure your milage may very.
Banks of Lough Gowna (jig) (some people play it in A minor, I guess, but you should learn it in B minor IMO)
Willie Coleman’s (jig)
The Cock and the Hen (slipjig) (in F# minor or B minor – lots of people have recently recorded it in F#, but I think our fiddlers prefer B)
Earl’s Chair (reel)
Jim Donoghue’s (reel)
Speed The Plough (reel) (see http://thesession.org/tunes/display/901 , there’s more than one common tune with this name)
Is there any harm in appearing to be a clueless newb if one is, in fact, a clueless newb? Maybe we are more friendly down south here, but nobody would get a cold shoulder for starting a basic tune if they are new to a session. Now, if they were a jerk in some other way, that’s another story.
My six:
Butterfly
Lilting Banshee
Star of Muenster
Sally Gardens
Silver Spear
Kesh
Here’s what I would list, based on the sessions in our area:
Morrison’s Jig
Banish Misfortune / Smash the Windows / Off She Goes
(a.k.a. “the Vandalism Set”)
John Ryan’s Polka
Mason’s Apron
Cooley’s Reel
Fanny Power
It’s a rare session where these tunes don’t get played.
Other tunes that you should know:
Kesh
Maid Behind the Bar
Home Ruler
Off to California / Harvest Home / Boys of Bluehill hornpipes
The Wise Maid
Swinging on a Gate
The Red Haired Boy
Tripping Up the Stairs
The Murrow
Salmon Tails Up the River
No shame at our session being new. When I was new I simply said “I have no idea what’s going on here, but I wanna learn”. I got lists, suggestions etc and got my arse to the woodshed (where I still spend lotsa time!) A new guy showed up on Tuesday with books and a music stand - classical player - reading everything down like ca-razy! Welcome.
Our top 6:
Road to Lisdoonvarna
Kesh Jig
Off to California
Flowers of Edinburgh
Rakes of Kildare
John Ryans Polka
I play at 2 sessions, one with rotating hosts, one in a different state. I hardly ever play the same tunes from session to session. Although there are a couple that usually pop up here are 6 of them:
The Connachtman’s Rambles
Drowsy Maggie
Morrison’s
The Sally Gardens
The Foxhunter’s Reel
Boys of Bluehill
The one John plays after the first one
The one that goes “dum de dum de diddly dum”
The one Philippe was playing for a while, but stopped
That Ed Reavy tune we play in a different key
The tune we don’t play
Paddy Fahey’s
Is “Ryan’s Jig” a slipjig, or is it a Sean Ryan jig or what? I’ve never heard of a jig called just “Ryan’s”, and thesession.org isn’t helping much. There is a nice “Sean Ryan’s” which is pretty common and a nice tune, but the first part spends a good bit of time beneath a D whistle’s range.
The “Ryan’s Jig” I know is the one more commonly known as the Lilting Banshee. It’s the one Jack Coen calls John Conroy’s and pairs with the excellent and fun to play (but little known) Jim Conroy’s (as recorded on The Branch Line).
That would probably be The Piper’s Chair, if we’re talking about the set I played so often that Brendan ended up stealing it from me. G major/D major tunes that unexpectedly land on an F natural in the middle of the second part (The Commodore would be another one of these) are always fun.
It was interesting last week for me as an East Coast guy to play in the sessions at the Friday Harbor Camp out in Washington state. As one might expect, almost all of the other campers were from the West Coast or at least west of the Rockies. When the sessions would start up each night, just the campers would be playing and I found that I knew most if not all of the tunes. (I played Banish Misfortune more times last week than I have in the entire rest of my life, but they weren’t all beginner/generic tunes being played at these sessions.) But anytime I started up a set that’s common here in the DC session scene (RiRa branch anyway) it seemed that not too many of the Westerners would join in. (Hopefully the reason wasn’t the way I was playing them…) Later on in the evening after the mostly Irish instructors would join the session and eventually form the core of it, I found that my tune repertoire intersection went down to about 50%. But I got lots of great new tunes recorded that I’ll start learning and playing.
Don’t know what that says about the topic at hand, but my own personal “how to learn tunes for session playing” philosophy is to pick tunes I like (whether they’re popular or well known or not), learn to play them well (this is an important step, 'cause with this approach there’s a strong likelihood I’ll be playing solo, at least for a while anyway), string them into sets of two or three, and start playing them out. Eventually if you play them enough and others like them and can get them into their heads, they’ll start playing them with you. I think there are at least half a dozen such tunes I’ve introduced to our local session this way over the past few years. As a parallel effort there’s always the challenge of learning the tunes that others are bringing to the session by following the same approach. I think this leads to a lively and satisfying session scene, avoiding the stagnancy that so often seems to happen when people focus only on learning the “most common session tunes”. The least common denominator is rarely the best!
BTW John, at our gig last night we busted out those three jigs you do, the set where the middle one has that thing in the second part. I forgot to mention those. Everybody should know them.
