This is one of the first songs I picked out on the whistle, playing it slowly, it worked as a ballad. Over the last few weeks as I’ve gotten a little better, this tune has wanted to speed up to it’s current level (and feels like it should maybe go faster).
I have no idea where I heard it. The memory feels old, all the way back to my childhood in the late 50’s, early 60’s. I might have heard it sung at a family reunion, maybe on one of my sister’s folk albums. At any rate, I believe the basic melody is correct. Any help would be appreciated: [u]unknown tune[/u] (size: 250k, mp3 format)
The tune is well known but the name escapes me at the moment.If I recognise it I am sure many others will and somebody is bound to supply a name very soon.I’ll keep thinking on it in the meantime.
Yep, it turns out it is, Down In The Willow Garden. Maybe the best known, unknown old timey tune around.
The process of practicing and recording it stirred up those 40 year old memories enough so that I had some lyrics fragments floating in my head when I woke up this morning. Some were wrong, but one was the key. The tune ends with “Rose Connolly”.
After a couple of tries at different spellings, I ended up at the Fiddler’s Companion list of tunes and [u]this entry[/u] about the original Irish tune “Rose Connoly”. It’s similiar to several other tunes and after crossing the Atlantic it became know in the Appalachians as “Down In The Willow Garden” (AKA Down By The Willow Garden, The Willow Garden and Rose Connoly).
Apparently the Irish version was an air and the recorded versions I’ve been able to find primarily treat it as a ballad, but of course those bluegrass musicians had to crank it up a bit. I guess my attempt was influenced by that, maybe folks would have recognized it easier if it were slower. I also made a mistake in that the B part does not resolve to the major, instead hangs strongly on the minor.
Later the tune was recorded by pop singers Peter and Gordon as well as Art Garfunkel. Jerry Garcia played on the Garfunkel cut and performed the tune live with “Old And In The Way” as well as in other Grishman collaborations, but he never recorded it (Grishman recently released a version).
Finally, although the tune remains popular in old time music circles, it may have reached it’s widest audience in the film “Raising Arizona” when Holly Hunter sang it as a lullaby to Nathan jr.
Now he sits in his own cabin door, a-wiping his tear-dimmed eyes.
Watching as his only son climbs up the scaffold high.
My race is run beneath the sun, and hell now waits for me,
because I murdered that dear little girl, whose name was Rose Connolly.
That one was mentioned just ten days ago on the [u]Forgiveness[/u] thread:
Your melody is a bit different from how I do it–particularly the B part. Your A reminds me of Acres of Clams (which shares its melody with exactly 3,189 other songs, including [u]The Cycling Champion of Ulster[/u]). I think that may be partly due to the tempo/rhythm.
My usual version sounds somehow similar to [u]The Sally Gardens[/u], although that one’s major, not Dorian. I’ve tried to figure out why, without writing them both out, but I can’t keep one in my head while playing the other.
I’ve seen the song attributed to Charlie Monroe, but there seem to be too many versions for it to be that recent. Of the links you posted, I think I like the Kossoy Sisters’ melody the best, though I usually play it slower than that on the whistle–closer to Ian & Sylvia’s tempo.
Now that I have some lyrics and can sing the tune, I can definitely hear some different things to play. The first part of both the A and B sections emphasizes the A in the resolution to the E (creating a stronger minor sound). Also, the high part of the B section stays high, landing on the high E (wine, sun etc). Finally, by speeding it up and trying to get that rythmic, rolling bluegrass feel, I sacrificed some of the time values of the notes and it ends up sounding even more generic.
There’s a version on by [u]Joan O’Bryant[/u] over in the Max Hunter folk song collection that sounds less generic and more like what some of the recoded versions are doing (at least with the harmony lines). I’m going to concentrate on this one as my slow version. The variants linked at the bottom of that are interesting also. One guy starts with an A section unlike any other, then when he goes to the B section, he uses that generic (3, 189 songs) melody and never goes back to his original A section. Another singer sounds like she wants to a B section, but stops and sings all the verses on the A melody. Fun listening.
Grayson has a couple of other whistle-friendly songs, Handsome Molly (also with Whittier) and Omie Wise. The latter has pretty much the same melody as Tragic Romance, but with just fiddle and voice, listening to it is as close to a religious experience as I’m ever likely to have.
There’s a version on by > [u]Joan O’Bryant[/u] > over in the Max Hunter folk song collection that sounds less generic and more like what some of the recoded versions are doing (at least with the harmony lines). I’m going to concentrate on this one as my slow version.
