Will be playing for dancers at a feis, and I know this sounds really lame, but for single jigs all I can come up with for some reason is “Off She Goes”, and I’d rather not play that if I can help it. How about some others? My shorted-out brain thanks you all in advance. 
I went to find one because I don’t really understand how a person could tell the diffence between a hornpipe and a single jig and I was going to ask you to explain it. After reading the definitions, I think maybe I would just have to listen to some and maybe I could learn that way—I don’t think there are any more words that would help.
So, I’m not suggesting you play this but I’m putting it down to show I am earnest 
. I am sure you are wanting single jigs that people have heard of before and that are somewhat commonly played. It is called Pat Ward’s Jig and I hope it would come up if you clicked on this:But it might not.
http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/cgi/abc/TuneGet?F=GIF&U=http://www.norbeck.nu/abc/i/hnsl0.abc&X=32&T=PATWARDSJIG&N=PatWardsJig.gif
Hi Nanohedron
I beleive that calliope house can be played as a single jig.
David
Some single jigs: “Old Torn Pettycoat”, “Happy to Meet, Sorry to Part”, “Maguire’s”.
djm
When you say single jigs do you mean slides?
Steve
Now, it’s my understanding that the only difference between slides and single jigs is the way they’re notated. That is, slides are the same musical concept as single jigs, but notated in 12/8 rather than 6/8, making the phrases half as many measures long. So would the phrase length in a slide be longer than a comparable single jig? That is to say, is the phrase length typically 4 measures in single jigs, and 2 measures in slides? Or perhaps 4 measures in slides, and 8 measures in slip jigs? Or does phrase length not matter in trad because we shouldn’t be notating music, anyway?
Hehe:
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=11003&highlight=single+jig
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=6188&highlight=single+jig
What goes around… comes around…
Here’s a nice single jig set:
Off She Goes/Sgt Cahill’s Favourite/May Fair Night
And
Take the Air and Walk About/Old Legacy
Patsy Mack/My Love in the Morning/An Chearc ar Fad is an Anairthe
Thanks, people, and David: I forgot about Calliope House. The ugly truth is I don’t have a lot of single jigs as they usually don’t grab me, so it’s almost all double jigs that I’ve got to hand.
I think single jigs and slides are very similar indeed, but there are differences to my ear sometimes. For instance, in Off She Goes: Dum de Dum de Diddle de Dum…Dum de Dum de Diddle de Dum; but in The Humours of Kiltyclogher, which I think of as a slide although I may well be wrong, you get: de Dydle de Dum de Dee de Dum de Diddle de Dum de Dydle de Dum. More of a loping feeling, and the phrasing is longer. Still, it seems to me that you could use slides for single jigs in a pinch. Some people say that the only real difference is in how they’re danced, but I’m not quite convinced. I’d rather be sure and have the real deal on hand and not play fast and loose with the dancers.
I think Cock o’ the North could work, too. It’s one of those I’m not quite sure of even though it’s sorta slidey sounding to me.
What’s a Feis?
Gary’s heard me play a set of Calliope House/Stool of Repentance/Music on the Wind. I put the last one on the end because it just seemed to fit.
Only later did I discover that it was notated as a slide in 12/8, when I found it in one of my tutor books. The others I learnt off a recording, so have no idea what they’re normally notated as.
I’ve played Calliope House for years and have never thought of it as a single jig. 
Steve
Hi Steve
We agree then - I think it is a slide. The ceili band at my branch of the CCE play it as a single jig - it sounds good no matter how you decide to play it.
David
Martin, a feis (pron. “fesh”) is a festival, you could say; in the context I’m referring to, the greater focus is on competetive dancing although there are other things going on, too. It’s mainly about the dancing, though.
Yeah, normally I think of Calliope House as a slide, too. The dancers I’m playing for are gathering at the facility hosting the feis at six freakin’ AM. Way past my bedtime. 
I’ll be there around then to make sure we’re all squared away, and then their performances begin at 8:30 AM until noon. I’m a major night owl, so I haven’t decided if I’m going to bed early or staying up for it.
Tried getting to bed early. Man, was that a mistake. Couldn’t sleep for all the revelry upstairs and all the Jameson’s in the world couldn’t help. Finally slept, and got up later than I ought to have, drove post-haste to St. Paul, parked farther away than I ought to have because not only is St. Paul a mystery to me, but I mistook the feis location, too. Made it to my stage at the stroke of 8:30, but fortunately the dancers weren’t ready to begin quite yet. Played with a fiddler that I had to continually rein in because he kept speeding up, and that was especially so on the slip jigs. By the way, if ever you play at a feis, gird your loins when it comes to the slip jigs: not only are they notably longer dances than the others, but you need to factor in the presence of as many as twelve to thirteen dancers taking their turns (normally by twos, and the odd number of course performs solo). It’s like an assembly line. The slip jigs are a definite endurance run, and I had to shake and massage my hands between groups. The single jigs were much easier by virtue of their shorter danced duration. I’m pleased to say that I only got “dinged” once by an adjudicator, and that was because she realised that the dancers of that particular moment, who were very young beginners, needed their reels faster than the recommended rate of 113 BPM. Hey, it wasn’t ME.
I did come to understand why so many musicians hate to play for competitions, but it didn’t get to me. I liked the challenge. Well, except for the reining-in of errant fiddlers.
Oh, and back on topic: I asked one adjudicator if a slide would stand in for a single jig. She asked me to play one, and said it would be fine. No worries, then, it seems.
Who was that box squeezer on stage D?
Lemmesee, I started on stage G, wasn’t it…dunno. What’d he or she look like? As we all rotated to the next stage clockwise after each hour, I’m not sure if I would have gotten a glimpse.
I don’t think notation exhausts the distinguishing features of ITM forms.
However, speaking of notation, my understanding is that both the single jig and SOME slides share the 12/8 time signature. It is the double jig that is 6/8. (ref. Mr Fintan Vallely, TIMBER The Flute Tutor ISBN 0 9511569 1 8 ).
Dead on right. I think this is a trap a lot of us with classical backgrounds fall into, led on by music books that do not do a good job explaining what the different dance forms are actually like.
I had two big eye-openers on this recently. The first was listening to my friend Steph talk about polkas, and a bowing pattern designed to bring out the proper internal accents in them. The second was going through a 19th century American tune book, and seeing that among 2/4 tunes, they distinguish between polkas, gallops, two-steps, schottisches, and reels. It may certainly be the case that in an Irish tunebook, a 2/4 tune is most likely to be a polka, but that is not at all the samething as saying all 2/4 tunes are polkas…
However, speaking of notation, my understanding is that both the single jig and SOME slides share the 12/8 time signature. It is the double jig that is 6/8. (ref. Mr Fintan Vallely, > TIMBER The Flute Tutor > ISBN 0 9511569 1 8 ).
It might be right that it is more accurate to notate single jigs in 12/8 – I honestly don’t know – but it only took me about 20 seconds to find a set of single jigs written down in 6/8. Might be wrong, but that’s the way it is.
yes. er … well there’s this Irish woman I know who dances these things and when I asked her to explain the distinguishing features she - well - she just kept dancing em over and over again very fast. “Oh I jjust dance them. I can’t explain”. And then, when she tried to explain it began something like this, " Well now. Just sit up and pay attention. Now when I say i mean [a+b], get it. Now, don’t interrupt till i finish. Now where was I? Well where was I ?" etc etc But, boy! can she dance!
Can anyone here give a succinct rundown on the distinguishing features of a single jig in dance?"
All I can say from my end is that -at competitions, anyway- single jigs seem to be mercifully brief.