Has anyone got some tunes for bitter sadness that can be played very sensitivelly to wet the eyes of audience and player alike?
And tunes for angryness and rage? I would love to know of some. I haven’t found anything quite satisfying yet, and I’m not much of a composer. Please help me out if you have some nice ones, I just can’t bring myself to play black metal stuff. 
“Leaving Glasgow” seems moderately successful on the weep-response scale. Then again, it may just be how badly I play it. 
“The Ten Penny Bit” (jig) always sounds rather angry/driving to me. It’s not the range, since “The Blackthorn Stick”, another jig that spends a lot its time in the second octave feels pretty relaxed. My tuppence worth.
Tunes in A minor and A mixolydian have a hungry, intense, edgy quality to me, yet B minor by comparison does not nearly so. Hmmm.
For sad: The May Morning Dew in D (gotta half-hole that upper Fnat if you’ve got no keys). It can be played in Em, too, but I think that D gives it a brooding quality.
For angry/spooky: Pull the Knife and Stick It Again à la Larry Nugent. Check the last track on his Windy Gap CD. The slip jig preceding it is pretty good for intensity, and then he plays PTNASIA in A minor. It’s usually played in E minor, but the A minor version is très Halloween.
“the flooded road to glenties” is a savage,angry,shmelly b minor reel.
i’m pretty sure you can find the abc somewhere, even if it’s not a
old tune(actually I don’t know who composed it).Paul Bradley recorded it, as well as befast flute player davy maguire.i love it!
The Kerryman is a reel particularly suited (in my humble opinion) to being played slow and with bags of feeling.
I don’t think tunes get much sadder or more melancholy than “A Parting of Friends.”
–James
Kevin Crawford said somthing like"…the most mournful, miserable,wreched tune you could play…" refering to “The Wounded Hussar.”
Eanach Dhúin (AKA Eanach Chuin) seems sad to me–and more so if you think about the topic of the song: “A lament by the poet Raferty (1789-1835) for eleven men and eight women who were drowned in Lough Corrib near Annaghdown (Eanach Dhúin) on their way to Galway with a cargo of sheep.”
Do You Remembet That Night? is another with a sad tale to match the tune: “The verses were composed by a widow whose husband had drowned bringing her cousins across the Shannon on their wedding night.”
Amhrán na Leabhar (Song of The Book, AKA Cuan Bheil Inse) can be made to sound pretty plaintive, though I don’t know what the original topic was.
(Quotes are from Waltons Ireland’s Best Slow Airs.)
Cathal McConnell wrote a slow air that appears on his solo CD “Long Expectant Comes At Last” called “Leaving Waverly Park.” The liner notes say it came about during a time of domestic trouble, when he was looking for a new place to live, and when he sat down with his flute this tune just came out. Hard to get more melancholy than that!! Plus it’s a lovely tune.
Steven
I have a hard time hearing “angry” in most traditional music of this sort I listen to. Maybe the first part of the Growling Old Man and Grumbling Old Woman (if that’s the right title) but even so, it doesn’t sound all that angry. Compare Irish or American trad music with some jazz where the musicians play short choppy phrases, saxophones screech out of the normal range and drummers drop bombs all over the place. That sounds angry. To me, a lot of the angriness comes from the phrasing. As I mentioned, it’s short and choppy and explosive, much the same as angry speech. A Strathspey in a minor key can sound sort of stormy but I still don’t hear anger in them.
Steve
Thanks very much guy’s. I’ll definately check these tunes out.
Leon’s Waltz, by Loretto Reid
how did you dredge this thread up, Annie? 
“The Flooded Road To Glenties” was composed by the late, great fiddler Jimmy McHugh, [RIP],long-time resident of Glasgow.
“Go To the Devil and Shake Yourself”, aka “When Sick, Is it Tea You Want”.
Monster Science is a good one… tough to find though
It is a lovely and melancholy tune that I was recently introduced to … I remembered this thread, so dug it out from under the years of dust.
I think that I was still being shy then. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cDjK5lMsRU&feature=related
Also ‘Four Loomed Weaver,’ a song about a bitter labor strike.
The tune is good alone.
Also the tune to ‘Come all you young and tender girls’
Words,
Come all you young and tender girls
That flourish in your prime.
Beware, beware, make your garden fair.
Let no man steal your thyme,
Let no man steal your thyme.
And when your thyme is past and gone
He’ll care no more for you
And ever a day that your garden is waste
Will spread all over with rue,
Will spread all over with rue.
A woman is a branched tree
And man a singing wind,
And from her branches carelessly
He’ll take what he can find,
He’ll take what he can find.
The tune alone expresses these sentiments.
Sounds great on flute, doesn’t even need
accompaniment.
The tune to ‘The Parting Glass’ is wonderfully sad
in a beautiful, not a biting way.
Scottish and British songs can wrench the heart,
and some of them go very well on flute
without accompaniment.