The Rake hornpipe

The Rake Hornpipe is a 16th century traditional hornpipe composed by Robert Alexander White.

This tune is featured in the animated TV show Spongebob Squarepants, which is where I heard it from. It’s originally played slowly like in this video, but I find a 1.25 - 1.5x tempo suits the tune much better. Lovely tune in any case.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aolvkt1EMYc

play video

If there’s one thing I can say for sure, it’s that this tune is not from the 16th century with folks like Palestrina, Gesualdo, and Dowland! But I also came to love this tune through SpongeBob! Does anyone know if it goes by another name? I find it odd that there’s only 1 setting

Setting #1 has a few problems with scansion - it has been typed as if in 6/8, but using the website’s hornpipe pro-forma, for which the time signature is fixed as 4/4. Setting #2 is a ‘corrected’ version, based on the ‘Spongebob’ recording. I have transcribed it in its simplest form, based on the top line played on the concertina (the whistle padds a couple of more elaborate twists. I have followed the convention of writing it out ‘straight’ (undotted), even though it is played on the recording with a heavily dotted rhythm.

This tune has the slightly unusual AABA structure (somewhat more commonly encountered in English tunes - which this very likely is). In the recording posted here, it is only played once through but, in my experience, such tunes, when repeated, tend to be played AAB AAB … and finish with an A. But AABA AABA … is also a possibility.