Nine comments
Did you wash your father’s shirt
I came across this reel in an advanced beginner’s class in Bristol a little while ago. One of the ladies there gave me the words which had been taught to her by her Irish grandmother many years before. The words fit the first part. Does anyone know if there are further words for the second part?
The words give me the impression this tune may have been a children’s school playground song. They give a little insight into Irish village life a long time ago.
There’s an English version of this rhyme (which starts "Oh, can you wash your father’s shirt"), with a different tune, which is fully pentatonic, thus having the advantage of being playable only on the black notes of the piano. As far as I know it doesn’t have a second part.
The words don’t seem to have appeared on the site.
Anyway, they are:
Did you wash your father’s shirt?
Did you scrub it clean?
Have you hung it on the washing line
By the village green?
Gather Round The Fire
T:Gather Round The Fire
M:4/4
L:1/8
S:Cathal Mcconnel & Robin Morton - irish jubilee
R:reel
K:D
|fdec dcAA|fdec d3z|f2ed cAAB|cAGE D3z|
fdec dcAA|fgec d2de|f2ec cAAB|cAGE D3z||
FG AB =cAG2|Addc d2ef|fdec cAAB|cAGE D3z|
(3EFG AB =cAG2|Addc d2ef|fdec cAAB|cAGE D3z|
If this tune was a playground song, they must have been pretty musically sophisticated kids! I got it off Paddy Moloney and Sean Potts’ record "Tin Whistles".
Did you wash your father’s shirt
Matt Cunningham plays this tune as the first of two on track 18 of the CD Volume 12* of his series Dance Music of Ireland. Interestingly, he plays it as a polka - it’s not unknown for bands to turn reels into polkas and vice versa for some set dances - and plays the B part first.
* I am in the course of identifying the 66 tunes on Volume 12 (the only information available is a list of the names of the set dance figures), and will post the results in the Recordings section in due course.
I learned this tune from Bernie Sullivan of Rochester, NY, who called it The Disappointed Coquette — subsequently found it in Kerr’s Merry Melodies under that title. This is pretty close to the Kerr version.
The Polka Version
A and B parts reversed, set as a polka:
https://thesession.org/tunes/1820
and:
https://thesession.org/tunes/14029
In Dublin in the 1950s my sisters would sing
"Come down and wash your Daddy’s shirt,
Come down and wash it clean,
Come down and wash your Daddy’s shirt,
And hang it in the Green"
while playing it on the black notes of the piano.