Wind The Bobbin Up barndance

Excuse my confusion, a friend was looking for this one and I kind of half remember it, but I’ve known it as a song too, and I don’t mean the children’s one but something that was either a protest song or about murdering ones lover. I did ask you to excuse any confusions on my part. I’m hoping that by submitting it others will come along and add some clarity and history. I haven’t yet found our collection of Morris tunes, but I suspect there will be a version of this in at least on of our books on that subject. I have checked through a number of others, but so far no luck.

Here’s a YouTube of some folks having fun with this one, and putting it through its paces and transformations:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxeU-bwSZLU

play video

I’ll give this more attention later and add at least another transcription based on their playing… Any help, added information and transcriptions would be greatly appreciated.

Curious, my notes for this went missing!?

As I’d written already ~ this melody, like a lot of basic Morris dance tunes, is a great beginning tune. These tunes are great as well for hard wiring the rhythms that make the music itself dance, beat and phrase. This simplified take shows more clearly the agreement between the A & B parts, bars 3 & 4, 7 & 8 of both the A & B parts.

This tune is very reminiscent of a Danish “cobbler’s dance” that is pretty well known. I learned the tune and dance back in primary school, but I had no idea that it was Danish until a friend from Denmark started humming the tune many years later. I’ll try and get more info on that. I know the tune, and it will have “skomager” somewhere in the title, but I’d prefer to have full details before submitting it. In the meantime, here’s a setting from Brian Martin, and Winterbourn Down Border Morris :- up above. They suggest it’s a variant of ‘Jenny Lind’.

Thanks Weejie, I like the idea of both connections… I too have it niggling in the brain, but I still haven’t found the collection I suspected it was in. If I’m confusing ti with another collection it wouldn’t be the first time my memory misfired…